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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (373798)	3/11/2008 8:47:36 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573135

We changed from wood to coal as the number one fuel source in the most advanced nations, when coal made more economic sense. We changed from coal to oil, when oil made more sense. They may have been subsidies involved in the transition but they where not key. Yes we will have to transition again at some point, but that doesn't imply the need for heavy subsidies. Those were different times.....most fossil fuels were plentiful. As one fossil fuel was found to burn better and more efficiently, we went for it....it was called trading up. Now we are in a different situation.....the world supply and demand of oil has become somewhat imbalanced.........huge amounts of our dollars are going to foreign countries to pay for the ever increasing cost of oil. In the meantime, oil burning is a pollutant. It serves us to invest in our future much like we did with the space program. You can call it a subsidy if you want but I call it embarking in venture capitalism.........its called being progressive something we haven't been for quiet some time.

To: TimF who wrote (373798)	3/11/2008 9:10:45 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573135

So the only imperative to you is economic. If that was the US' only imperative, then you may have a point, although that is debatable, because $110 oil is crippling our economy right now. However, there are other priorities in the US, including national security and environmental. When you add those into the mix, it becomes very clear that the US can't afford to wait for market dynamics to evolve on its own to take care of this problem. At the end of the day, some industries represent a strategic imperative for this country. Energy is one of those. All of our past Presidents recognized that energy was a strategic imperative and they have continually gone as far as using our military to secure our energy supplies. Securing our alternative energy supplies is no different and significantly cheaper than deploying our military to do the same with oil.