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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (19656)	4/30/2008 2:38:13 AM
From: MJ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Because of your writing on the stock market boards I know you are very informed regarding energy and such things as "Clouds"----I am still intrigued with the Clouds in computing. (that was an aside) Certainly we need to balance our energy resources and use a variety of methods and modes. A couple of things that come to mind on the energy-----in Virginia we are already getting some percentage of our electrical power generated by wind farms as well as Nuclear and natural gas. Even there, there are many questions to be asked------i.e. will wind farms hold up in tornadoes such as Suffok Virginia experienced in the last few hours Another which came to my attention recently----a Virginia friend who still farms, built a house and is heating and cooling it with "geothermal". This doesn't work in all locations. It depends on the lay of the land. With Obama's campaign, I noticed in the beginning he was talking about coal liquefication(gasification) and then suddenly the subject seem to disappear. This is a subject he should revisit. mj

To: stockman_scott who wrote (19656)	4/30/2008 9:22:12 AM
From: zeta1961	Respond to of 149317

Friedman's piece today edifying for me..I could have bolded the whole thing... the politicization of our Congress and the lost jobs in not extending tax credits to wind/solar happened to stand out...... ______________________________________ The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years. “It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.” It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.