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

To: Bill who wrote (553794)	3/8/2010 7:23:25 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574199

No and no. First of all, when I talk about energy independence, mostly what I mean is OIL independence. It is completely within our power to consume only as much oil as we produce. We produce 5 mbpd of oil today and we can probably squeeze out another 6-8 mbpd out of domestic supply, if we drill everywhere, and I'm all for that. But then we need to reduce our consumption by 7-9 mbpd, if we are to limit our demand to what we ourselves can supply. The way to do that is to create natural gas/electric hybrids vehicles. Our entire fleet could be converted to NG/electrics within 15 years, reducing our oil consumption by 10-13 mbpd. That would give us surplus oil to sell on the open market. All of this is entirely possible, we only lack the political will to make it happen. As for meeting the rest of our energy needs, we should go whole hog on nuclear power and build a nuke power plant every year for the next 50 years to meet most of our demand, while sunsetting coal plants when they reach the end of their useful life and replacing them with nuclear and natural gas plants. We should also diversify into solar, wind, and wave power to provide additional energy. To make all of this happen, we need to let the market place a price on CO2 emissions. That would create the market incentive to move to clean burning fossil fuels and renewable energy. All of this is not only technologically possible, but cost effective, and would provide the US with an incomparable economic edge against our foreign competitors. There is really no good reason why we don't do this. We just have stupidity on both sides of the aisle.