Oil is expensive, but the United States has TONS of oil that it is refusing to pump. The U.S. can develop natural gas, coal and nuclear, but seems to be refusing to allow itself to do those things and instead is frittering money away by attempting to go with very expensive solar and wind power ... those only account for about one percent of energy now and with maximum effort might get up to about three percent.
Every other country in the world is working overtime to develop oil, natural gas, coal and nuke ... except the United States. The same could be said for refinery capacity.
The notion of man-made [anthropogenic] global warming has been shown to be false every time its advocates and proponents bring up another argument in its favor.
It's a very strange notion.
Hi, Al,
Interesting post. I'll try and keep this as apolitical as possible, knowing our intended purpose is AIM and finding vehicles to use it with utmost efficiency, but I am interested in the range of opinion of the people posting.
My view is that solar and wind are renewable sources. If we were to fund development of these the way conventional energy sources have been, the cost would drop, and quickly. It's amazing to see how much solar is in use here, even though we're one of the most constantly overcast areas in the Northeast!
Oil and coal are environmentally damaging and of finite quantity. Nuke may be more efficient in the short term, but you've the long term issue of waste and expired generation facility disposal, not to mention the also thorny issue of transporting the stuff from wherever it's been made to whatever site is deemed "safe." Also the ever-present risk of creating more targets of opportunity for failure, either through operator (think Chernobyl), equipment (Three Mile Island) or terrorist. Ideally fusion would bring a little of the Sun right to the Earth, needing only hydrogen for fuel, but it's still a "Real Soon Now" wished-for sci-fi dream. Even then, the other issues remain.
Playing Devil's advocate for your position that human-generated global warming is nonexistent, my question then becomes, "Ok, even if so, where is the harm in better conservation, greater automobile efficiency and so on?" If the USA is supposed to be a world leader, being the first to do so would encourage the rest of the world to follow. Instead the mood seems to be a "damn the consequences," party like it's 1968 and gas is 30 cents a gallon. Make it the problem for the kids and grandkids, even the recent "G8" meeting deferred any significant action until 2050.
That the "developing" countries feel a need to equate their success by how quickly and well they can embrace the worst of our consumer culture shows an equal lack of vision all around.
Global warming or not, I think we all can agree that over 6,000,000,000 people are going to have a larger impact on the planet than 1/6th of them would. 1,000,000,000 being a number I read not too long ago as a reasonably sustainable population level without being too much a cancer on the planet. What about the other 5,000,000,000 - well, that's another issue, isn't it?
Best,
AIMster
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