Isn't this a breath of fresh air? Watching Barack Obama talk about these important issues also makes me think of eight years of lost opportunities. At least we're going to have an energy policy, rather than policy vacuum driven by a blind faith in the "free market." [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvG2XptIEJk&eurl=http://www.facebook.com/home.php[/youtube]
John McCain wants to have a contest that will award $300 million to the person/company that develops a better car battery. Yes, it would be great thing if someone would develop a better battery, but it seems to me that spending massive amounts of money in a contest is a…
I wrote about complacency once before. I focused on the complacency of most Americans in the face of the energy crisis that is clearly upon us. We have no assurance that gasoline won’t double or triple in price over the next five or 10 years, throwing our economy into a massive depression. With stakes like these, you would think that prolific energy wasters like us would immediately jump on our energy consumption problem by enacting a national conservation plan to cut our petroleum use in half. This could be accomplished by modifying our wasteful energy usage in dozens of ways. For instance, we really could carpool. We could build up our mass transit systems and encourage their use. We could walk and bike more. We could make our homes much more energy-efficient. Instead of building new homes in existing farm fields, we could renovate homes that already exist. While we’re at it, we could cut our use of all other forms of energy in half too. For instance, the technology already exists to make zero-carbon footprint buildings.
Others have written extensively regarding many methods by which we could reduce energy use. Due to the widely accepted law of supply and demand, cutting our use of energy would also have the effect of lowering the price of energy (relative to whatever it would have been had we not taken such measures), thereby diminishing the financial damage from our perennial trade deficits and budget deficits.
My concern is that so many people …
I've been following various articles in my local newspaper and local television "news," looking for some recognition of the seriousness of the problem with soaring energy prices. This problem is entirely predictable by reference to the simple economic relationship between supply and demand. We've got a finite diminishing supply of…
An enthusiastic conservation effort, coupled with a wide variety of alternative sources of energy, will soften the blow of peak oil, but it might be too little too late. And it's incredibly difficult to get people to actually do something serious about conserving energy (see Janisse Ray's "Altar Call for…