Don, you are working from a false premise. If Reagan stopped spending opm on photovoltaics, that didn't mean BP had to stop and did not stop. The fact that Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski had the really stupid idea of "giving them their own Vietnam" in Afghanistan and that Reagan thought it a spiffing idea too didn't make it a good one. Nor did Reagan's spending of umpty$billions on star wars and whatnot cause the USSR to collapse. Gorby did it by refusing to use bulk murder to force the recalcitrant Baltic states [Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia] into compliance. As soon as the Warsaw Pact USSR bloc populations realized there would not be mass murder, they bust through the Berlin Wall and the game was over.
You seem to think that unless Big Brother Brownshirts force development of things, nothing will happen. Don't worry, hordes of people are looking for ways to turn $5 into $10 and they do it by finding and developing things that people will buy, to solve problems or have fun. Such as photovoltaics, fusion reactors, mobile Cyberspace.
Don't be scared by fracking. Rocks crack all the time. Have you not heard of plate tectonics? The world is constantly moving, rocks cracking, hydrocarbons leaking to the surface. The San Andreas fault is one monster fracking and California is doing fine.
Those hydrocarbons belong in the air, where they provide the nutritional foundations for life and hopefully prevent reglaciation back into the ice age which has been on the planet for millions of years. The homeopathic 280 parts per million of CO2 before anthropomorphic CO2 as barely enough for plants to survive. It was at an all-time low because carbon had been stripped from the atmosphere since the carboniferous era when it was at about 6000 parts per million and was buried in vast cemeteries of coal, oil, gas, limestone, tars and shale. People have recycled the carbon back into the ecosphere. Plants are loving it. Crops are booming. Irrigation requirements are reduced.
Mqurice |
