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Sat 7 Aug, 2004 09:45 am
Every time I see the casualty count from our operations in the Middle east and the cost $190 Billion and climbing I can't help but wonder if all that effort and dollars had been spent in developing and subsidizing alternate sources of energy could this have been avoided. If we had put as much effort and funding as we did in the Manhattan project [development of Atom bomb] IMO we would by now have been free of the curse of the need for Mid east oil. Where the heck are our leaders are they blind or are they so indebted to the oil industry that they refuse to see. Sure they trumpet a half hearted energy policy which may come to fruition sometime in the future Which in my opinion is just for publics consumption. Remember the Manhattan project produced the Atom bomb in about three years. And we with all our advanced knowledge talk about 10,20 ,30 years down the line for alternate sources of energy. Why??
If we have an energy policy, I sure don't know what it is. I have the sickest feeling that for the past 20 years or so we've been eating our seed corn. I hope I'm wrong.
The only long term solution I can see is to develop fusion power, and then use the electricity generated to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen as fuel. We probably couldn't effectively spend much more than 3 to 4 billion a year in developing the first fusion power plants. As far as I'm concerned, we're guilty of criminal negligence that we haven't been steaming full speed ahead on this for years.
In the interim, expanded drilling in Alaska, and a gas pipeline from the North Slope to the lower 48 should have been in progress for years. A 50,000 BPD coal to syncrude Plant would cost about 3-5 billion, and would probably break even on operating costs (but you'd never get your investment back). We should have been building one of these every 12-18 months for the past 20 years. A 1-2 cent per gallon tax on gasoline and diesel would pretty much have paid for the program.
The first Mel Gibson movie I saw was "The Road Warrior". At the beginning of the movie black-and-white newsreel footage is shown of the world going to hell in a handbasket, while the narrator explains how it happened. At the end, he says in a voice full of dispair and disgust "and all they did was talk". That pretty much sums up how I feel about our Government (of all political parties) and our energy policy. We've known this day was coming since the early 70's, and we've done next to nothing about it.
Jim wrote:If we have an energy policy, I sure don't know what it is. I have the sickest feeling that for the past 20 years or so we've been eating our seed corn. I hope I'm wrong.
Doesn't it scare you when someone as practical minded as Jim writes something like this? It does me.