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Politics : BuSab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (4551)	8/8/2010 5:01:18 PM
From: MulhollandDrive	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23934

i think i would prefer to let the free market take care of our energy sources... if you believe in peak oil (and it sounds like you do) the prices of oil will necessarily continue to rise until the price becomes onerous for businesses and people to function the fact that we had a major demand contraction when the price of oil was bid up to $147/barrel tells me that the process of getting off fossil fuels will happen with fits and starts.....it will take extremely punitive prices of oil to cause a fundamental shift to alternative energy... that said, i believe for example, one very intelligent thing we could have done with the stimulus (instead of keeping thousands of worthless bureaucrats employed) would have been to use that money to electrify our freight rail system (and not the high speed people movers that politicians love to build)....doing that would have saved millions of barrels of diesel....and i believe i read somewhere the estimated cost would have been nearly $500B...(nearly half the 'stimulus')this type of mitigation of the use of fossil fuel (along with nuclear, and some solar) makes sense the problem with most alternative energy sources is that they cannot be amortized successfully over time to make them attractive...at least for now at current oil prices i looked into doing a solar powered home in s. utah and the cost would have taken over 30 years to recoup....factor in a declining housing market and it really is a nonstarter (without major gov't subsidies) the bottom line here is that PRICE will dictate what form alternative energy will take....the status quo of fossil fuel (middle east) can certainly be disrupted and can cause price spike, but those ultimately create demand destruction and the cycle starts again ps... china will eventually go nuclear...for now they have to stockpile diesel and mine their own coal to run their factories and energy plants, but i believe they will ultimately have nuclear energy as its main power source