mheslep said:
Jumping in here - allright, but your prior post was a plan that only sanctioned fossil fuels. Perhaps you were referring only to transportation needs, but it seems your proposal for transportation energy would still have us indefinitely importing oil from maniacs, and would dismiss harm from emissions? I don't buy into the latter entirely, but neither do I recommend indefinitely dumping the yearly emissions from a cubic mile of petroleum into the atmosphere.
First, my "plan" has been sticky'd at the top of this forum for just short of five years*. That post above is in response to a single, specific point someone else made and doesn't have much to do with how I think we
should proceed overall. It is nothing more than a reality check about how the world works and an objection to an inflammatory post.
No one in here is naive about what drives buying decisions for consumers. We all saw how SUV sales plummeted after hurricane Katrina doubled gas prices and then went right back up again (over a year and a half) as they fell again. That happened in the 1970s during the gas crises there as well. This is how the world works and this is what is going to continue to drive buying decisions. Scaremongering about the inevitable, near collapse of civilization is unhelpful and wrongminded. Whether we act prudently to fix the problem or not, it just isn't going to happen.
But now that we're on it, I
do think that we will eventually
need to get off gasoline to power cars. I think it would be
nice if we could hasten the demise of gasoline, but I don't see any evidence that there are any real ways to do that. Right now, people are banking on research: they're lying under that tree that was mentioned before and
hoping that eventually plug-in hybrids or electrics or synthetic methane or fuel cell vehicles will some day be viable. But while they are doing that, they are ignoring the low hanging fruit that not only could they pick now, but they
must pick now in order for
any of those gasoline alternatives to become viable! What I'm talking about is what I harp on over and over in energy threads: the fact that half of our electric power comes from coal. Until that issue is addressed, we're just trading one fossil fuel for another, making fancy looking cars that really are nothing more than 150 year old coal fired steam locomotives.
Please understand: I'm not saying we shouldn't research these ideas. I'm sayinig that researching these ideas is only part of what is needed and isn't even the biggest piece. The biggest piece is modernizing the power grid to generate more power using less coal. And there is only really one viable way to do that: we need to start building nuclear plants, by the hundreds,
now. Talk of wind power and even worse solar power are worse than doing nothing because they pay lip service to the problem while guaranteeing that it won't be fixed. So what's going to happen? In 20 years, we'll have 10 times as much wind power as we do today and we'll
still have more coal power than we do today. Wind power growth will be stagnating and
then people will realize that they sqaundered the last 20 years building wind plants when they should have been building nuclear plants. We're following the path that Germany is already far along on (though Germany is proving the poing faster by shutting down nuclear plants and building lots more coal plants to cover what their wind plants can't do).
The US will
eventually be an mostly nuclear country like France, but it will be at least 50 years until that happens and we're going to see a lot of needless failure and pain before that happens. Assuming the daydreaming bears fruit, in 20 years, France will be sitting pretty with their electric or fuel cell (or whatever) cars, having the electrical infrastructure needed to power them. We won't. That's not what
should happen, that's my prediction about what
will happen.
*Probably time to update it...
