First of all, my main concerns are national and economic security. Environmental benefits are great, but I think the more immediate problem is our addiction to energy sources in the Middle East and Venezuela, ...our economy's vulnerability to supply disruptions
Those are good arguments to produce more oil and natural gas in America and to promote the use of nuclear power and coal. All conventional proven technology and economical today.
sure there are some environmental concerns with both wind and solar, but they are an order of magnitude easier on the environment than coal and oil. Alternatives win that contest hands down.
I think thats only true if we consider CO2 as a pollutant that can drive global warming. I think the evidence for that claim is based on models that are necessarily simplistic assumptions about feedback loops. Certainly ice core data doesn't show CO2 levels driving global temperature, but following it.
This is a genuine concern, but we already have the technology and viable solutions that can be implemented. First, we need a more reliable, more distributed, and efficient national electric grid. Second, utilities need to invest in backup power storage mechanisms, whether it's supercapacitors or lithium ion batter banks, or heat storage in molten sand, or a highly distributed storage system such as drawing power from homes and electric cars with excess power stored. All of that needs to be built and all of it is doable.
You're saying we need a new better electrical grid and new power storage systems (supercapacitors, lithium ion battery banks, molten sand heat storage, even pulling power from homes and electric cars). And the wise folks in Congress can tell us how to get that. Wow. Seems an act of faith to believe that.
I don't mean to minimize the challenges, but this national challenge is actually easier to solve than landing a man on the moon.
I think you're definitely under-estimating the "national challenge" involved. There is an awful lot of capital tied up in our existing electrical grid. Replacing it with a new better one would be very costly and so would building all those power storage systems which don't exist now.
But since you think it can be done with an effort equivalent to the moon landing, why not cancel the Mars mission and use that money? That surely is gonna be more than the moon landing since Mars is much farther away. So just canceling the Mars program should allow us plenty to completely changeover our electrical grid and build a power storage system. If you're right about the magnitude of the challenge.
And we can easily afford it. In fact, if we had taken the $1 trillion we've spent on Iraq, we could have afforded to build our national infrastructure twice over to rely mostly on alternatives.
Oh please. The trillion dollar number (and the $3 trillion phony baloney number also often quoted) is derived by assuming the soldiers and equipment used in Iraq wouldn't have been used otherwise and adds up assumed future costs plus includes big estimates for higher oil prices due to the war and the economic affects of those higher oil prices plus interest on the national debt. Funny accounting.
But here's something that will cost 85% of a trillion dollars - the proposed Global Poverty Act aka the global tax:
americanthinker.com
americanthinker.com
How about not spending THAT money, which is supposed to go overseas, btw? Since you indicated we only need to come up with a half a trillion dollars to achieve what you want, this will be more than enough.
Where do you want to spend your tax dollars...in the Middle East to get us more dependent on all the countries that hate us or right here in the USA to cut the cord to all those countries that hate us.
Well as I mentioned there are proven ways to develop domestic energy sources here in the USA that don't require spending tax money at all. Opening up new areas for leasing would actually bring in money to the government from lease bonus payments and future income from royalties. Oil companies would pony up the money - we know because they're doing it already where we allow them to. Then there is coal and nuclear - removing obstacles to building new power plants using these sources wouldn't involve spending any tax money either - utility companies and other investors would provide the investment. And no one can say we have a shortage of coal or uranium so our potential to produce new power from these sources is vast and proven.
Then re the ME, there's other issues involved even were we to independent of energy from there. First, other nations would still be dependent on ME oil and gas and disruptions there could trigger worldwide economic problems that affected us indirectly. Second, there are other issues involved in the ME other than energy too, like for example nuclear proliferation. We would still be interested in that even if we were indpendent of the ME for energy. |
