1) Concerns about foreign sources of energy are reasons to favor producing more conventional energy here - oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear.
Agreed. The Fed should allow drilling on public lands, but should not provide incentives to do so. Instead, let the oil companies pay market rate leases. The revenue from those leases should be used to encourage diversification of the country's energy sources.
2) Conventional energy sources don't require vast government investments of taxpayer money and are based on known technologies. In fact, they may raise money for the government from lease bonus payments, annual rentals, and royalties.
You are correct. They don't require it. However, it is all a matter of how fast you want to go and how much of the future alternative energy market's wealth you want to capture for this country. We could go at our current pace and we'll get there eventually through market forces, but other countries will own all the patents and wealth creation of the new industries. Or we could incubate it and get there fast with government help, and we'll hold most of the wealth creation engines, just like we did from the Internet. Alternative energy is coming. We need to be a first mover in the industry.
3) "Alternatives" like wind and solar are better environmentally, only if we assume CO2 is a pollutant. Wind and solar do have environmental impacts too.
Environmental concerns are last place in my list. Diversification of our energy sources for national and economic security give all of us plenty of motivation for wanting to do something about being addicted to oil from our worst enemies. From that perspective, wind, nuclear, and solar will do just fine.
4) Its foolish to think the govt can quickly command the construction of a better grid and a brand new electrical storage system (which doesn't exist now and will be based on new technologies) for the cost of the manned moon mission.
Go back and read your history books. In particular, focus on the New Deal. Oh and btw, the technologies exist today. We just aren't using them to the extent that we should. Homes are already off the grid and have installed battery storage systems and they work just fine without losing any of the conveniences of modern life.
5) Politicians are likely to make investments based on political considerations, not what is most economical. Command-planned economies don't work as well as those that evolve freely.
Agree completely. However, if we deliberately pulled together a working group of academics, industry captains, and government officials, we could do wonders. This is the Silicon Valley model and it has brought more wealth to California over the last few decades than any other part of the country. Good working models of how this works have been studied by economists for a couple decades now. We just need to put it into practice on a national scale.
6) If we could do all that (see item 4) for the cost of a manned moon mission, we ought to consider canceling the Mars mission and or the Global Poverty Act to fund the initiative.
I agree. We should cancel the Mars mission and replace it with the Alternative Energy mission. Obama plans to invest $150B over 10 years to this type of effort. I think his plan is in the ballpark. He can get the money from 1 year's worth of savings from shutting down this ridiculous Iraq war.
7) ME oil would still be important to us even if we didn't use any because the world economy relies on it.
You know as well as I do that the rest of the world follows the US when it comes to major economic shifts. If we were to do what Brazil did and become fully energy independent, we'd be the envy of the world and the rest of the world would be falling all over themselves to buy our technology so they could do the same. Oil prices would crater and would likely never recover just from the fact of our own diversification. Add to that the rest of the world and the Middle East will go back to being a desert, which is all the relevance it should be given.
8) There are other issues involved in the ME besides energy, such as religious-driven terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Money is the root of evil over there. Take away the money and all you have are impotent Mullahs. Give them $500B a year in US cash and you have a deadly enemy, which is what we have right now. It's simple math. No money, no power, no threat. |
