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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oblomov who wrote (67525)	8/14/2005 7:25:51 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 74559

The best/least bad alternative from which perspective? > Strategically, it is problematic to import so much energy. Form that perspective it makes sense to impose a import tax on oil to make alternatives profitable. But this makes everything we produce less competitive. > The most economic energy alternative long-term is to use less. Make homes and cars more energy efficient. And even greater savings are possible by placing passive solar and heat-pump technology into homes to utilize the energy available on-site. People say, where do we put all of those solar farms? On the building where the energy is used. And why convert solar into electricity when you really want to use the solar energy to heat the home and hot water supply? Industrial energy reduction, reuse, and passive solar use is way ahead of residential. Some of this is economic today, but inertia and initial captial stands in the way. Other measures cost more. > If carbon emission is causing global warming and you wish to reverse this process -- the most economic sources of energy are geothermal, solar cells and disguised variations of solar power, such as wind and tidal generation. > Nuclear power is very economical -- but only if you socialize the cost of safely storing the waste for 10,000 years. If you privatize this cost, nuclear power is so uneconomic that almost any alternative makes sense by comparison. > If you are not concerned about carbon emissions, then there is plenty of coal available, along with less economic crap like tar / oil sands. There is also oil shale which is perhaps the least economic of all. Oil shale deposits are located where water is scarce, and it takes a lot of water to extract oil from shale. .