Quote:
Originally Posted by DammitBoy!
If you'd like to see us out of the middle east and it's fucked up politics, we have to eliminate our importation of mideast oil.
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No, we must eliminate oil imports, but that isn't possible by merely drilling for more oil in US territory. The only possible solution is to move to a sustainable energy economy which means deriving all power needs from either solar or geothermal.
While conservative talk about nuclear being all or part of the solution, they fail to admit that they don't know how to make nuclear happen any time in the next two decades. The refuse to recognize that the physical world is a lot different from pushing money around and selling no doc loans in order to get rich. Nuclear power plants actually require highly skilled people and massive capital investments in infrastructure and time to do R&D, which can't really start until an education system is in place to produce the scientist and engineers.
So, the simple solutions are things like wind generators and solar heat collectors and in a decade putting solar PV on every roof top that isn't covered with ground cover and meadow lands. And the simple solutions of building houses and building to be highly energy efficient so they require very little oil and gas to heat them, and little electricity to cool them.
The real key to solar and geothermal and PV and energy efficiency is that each one will be done millions of time each year so you have a really dynamic market for the technologies and the people who do the work, so collectively the natural search for easier ways to do things and the quest for profit by being cheaper and the competition will cause small improvements to be done each week. After five years, there have been a couple of hundred refinements incorporated and tested millions of times so it is clear that progress is being made.
It seems impossible that the state of the art for solar and geothermal and construction and so on can be radically changed in two decades, but then again, two decades ago only a handful of people could imagine the internet and all the applications and all the users that make up the internet today.
Along the way, you can point to no single quantum leap in technology that if it weren't discovered would have prevented the internet from existing as it does today. In fact, you can't identify 100 inventions over the past quarter century that if deleted would have prevented the internet from existing today.
The idea that drilling for oil everywhere or building nuclear power plants is the path to success is to argue that the Soviet Union proves that central planning by politicians is the best solution to economic growth and technology leadership.
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