I am a HUGE advocate of alternative energy because...

of reasons that you might not have guessed. Climate change? I honestly don't know if we're causing it or if it's even accurate. Time magazine did an article on Global Cooling in the 70's. WTF? So I'm not a scientists and I just don't know.

But I do know this: The country that comes up with the first commercially viable alternate energy source, gets rich. Additionally, we would enjoy the privilege of watching every country that supports terrorism, go broke when that technology becomes commonplace. Oh darn.
So the USA gets rich and creates some jobs.
The Saudis, Yemeni's, Persians etc... go back to being nomads.

The downside is?

As far as putting money into companies doing the R&D? Couldn't think of a better place to put it.

 

I agree completely. I am unsure about global warming being 1.real, 2.man made, and 3.necessarily a bad thing. But I do know that it is inevitable that we will run out of fossil fuels, so this technology MUST be developed at some point. Might as well be now, while we still have energy to run our factories and such. It would be a lot harder to R&D this inevitably necessary technology if we wait until we have to manufacture things by hand because we used up all our oil. Plus, we will probably need plastics and polymers to make the transition, and for as long as we can make them. So why burn up the oil that we need to make lasting goods? Also, as you said, making the middle East and all it's BS problems irrelevant would be a great thing for us to do as soon as possible, before they can pull everyone into WWIII.

 

But where are you going to get the money from?

 

Global warming is real and aggravated by the usage of our current technology, but there's no guarantee that we could actually put forth any policies that would make it reverse. We just have to move forward with energy independence and build toward an infrastructure of clean, renewable energy. Which is feasible and would keep us in the forefront of economic prosperity. New infrastructure has never been implemented without a heavy contribution from government.

 

Well let's see. Maybe we could quit giving $4B to the Big Oil companies that are shipping American jobs overseas, as a start. Then maybe stop giving the billions to the Saudis, Israel, Colombia ...

 

That a contradiction in terms. Most of the tax breaks American oil companies enjoy come from drilling in the US. US oil production is booming despite the feds efforts to stop it.

 

Proof???

Yes Big Oil could stop - especially drilling in deep water or fracking in farmlands but it is not the only one. The coal fired poser

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Federal_coal_subsidies

 

The "downside" is....There is no adequate alternative energy source today. Maybe in the future there will be but not now.

 

Where the cost to manufacture 100 wind turbines or solar panels today is X, but the cost to manufacture 1,000,000 wind turbines or solar panels tomorrow would be X-Y which is far cheaper right?

 

That's fine but the point of my thread is 1. the country that makes the technological breakthrough to commercial viability first become rich and 2. I think it would be swell if that was because 3. I wouldn't mind bankrupting OPEC.

I'm sure you've been told that. I'm not sure I'm convinced. But in any case, the point is that it would be good to make the commercial breakthrough. based on your attitude we would all be driving horse & buggies and no one would have phones, tv's or computers. All technology starts out expensive and inefficient.

 

Alternative energy advocates should put more emphasis on peak oil, IMHO. People dont care that much about penguins in antarctica. But oil is the foundation of our way of life, and the billions will flow much faster with this particular boogeyman.

 

Once again the fact that terrorism is financed by OPEC is stated, but people who say that come to the wrong conclusion. Any nation worth surviving would immediately conquer the Islamic oilfields and confiscate their oil. Even with your motivation to bring long-term prosperity to the US, seizing OPEC oil would bring trillions of dollars into our economy. Why can't people come to logical conclusions about what they are saying, instead of using what should be a declaration of war as a throwaway line to justify premature futurism?

 

The oil companies, which have enough power to impose a required opinion, benefit from the myth of oil scarcity. Using 150 years of bad predictions as a test of reliability, it wouldn't surprise me if there is as much oil left as there is water in the oceans, especially since they both came through similar processes. As far back as the 1880s, Rockefeller was told that oil would probably run out soon and it was too risky to get into the oil business! The desire to believe in doomsday predictions, while pretending you really believe in a premature futurism, is a symptom of suicidal decadence. Such a decline in realism and replacing it with Jetsons fantasies can only precede a collapse of civilization. But you have been convinced that profitable Hollywood doomsday scenarios are the real realism.

 

It's real and it is a bad thing. I'm not sure it's man made, but I'd bet we ain't helping any.

 

There are a few examples in nature were heat is caused by a million to billions of living organisms.
1. by termites in their hill, a million termites cause heat in the hill so these creatures have created a cooling system in base of hill.
2. by billions microbes in a pile of hay or in a composting process. Such a pile in cold air starts to smoke after a while, the billions of microbes start to eat the pile and that process (energy) is causing heat inside (temperature rises)

Yes, the world need to start to retrieve alternative energies (geothermical, geothermal, tidal, blue energy, solar collectors, the big sustainable alternatives, wind and solar are connected to oil and base materials and ineffient and cause landscape 'pollution', without oil and the base material there can't be wind and solar, but the alternative are coming from processes that do not need oil, only the first power plants have to be build, from the first you can increase to globally generation) within the next decades and tap new markets from that.

 

Oil is finite.

Today we know only about a certain 'presumed' quantity of oil reserves.

The cost of extraction/production increases as supplies deplete.

World population continues to increase.


I suggest everyone play their own game, either with their own assumptions, or by using some research data, and chart the four items mentioned above. It would also be nice if you could factor in the FACT that the USA and the world is dependent on fossil fuels. I suggest that the above exercise is not a Jetson's fantasy...

 

One of the reasons to support it is that the US is losing control over the world's oil supply. the So called "petrodollar" viability as an anchor for the world economy is going the way of the Gold / Dollar exchange that ended under Nixon. the US needs to come up with another resource that will supplant Oil in the world economy that we can tie our dollar to or risk financial collapse.

 

I'm really hoping you're just a very clever satirist here...

 

I'm really hoping you're just a very clever satirist here...

 

This is what changed my mind about whether or not man made climate change was real.

When you can make a prediction before the data is available, that lines up perfectly when the data does become available, and the study is 100% public for anyone to debunk, and no one has, I count it as compelling evidence.

http://berkeleyearth.org/

 

So is the life of the sun.

 

You have been lied to about oil running out by those you have been led to least expect to advocate alternative fuels to re-inforce their lies. The oil companies have a self-interest in claiming that the supply of oil is dangerously depleting. That way they can charge us more. But oil is as abundant as water in the oceans; how much would they be able to gouge us on prices if consumers realized that?

 

You have a mental block against recognizing the self-evident truth if it doesn't fit into the lies you have been programmed to think. Your answer is whistling in the dark, hoping that those who tell the humiliating truth of how you are being manipulated by collaborators are only joking. It is obvious that the Muslim OPEC countries are financing a jihad with their price-gouging; the normal, expected, and justifiable reaction to that is to confiscate their oil. Without that weapon, they'd be fighting us with sticks and stones, which is fitting for such a Stone Age rabid Arab rabble.

 

Not exactly. The doomsday predictions of running out of oil have always been based on the numbers of how long resources that are currently able to be tapped based on current technology would last and estimates of the inflating usage of oil in the future. The fact that we constantly have been evolving technology on how to reach and extract more difficult sources of oil is why these doomsday predictions have never come true.

There is a need for the US to be at the forefront of any new energy technology is that the Petrodollar's lifespan is coming to an end. It is inevitable that another energy source will replace Oil sometime between now and 50 years from now despite how much kicking and screaming oil advocates do. So it's not that we will run out of Oil, but that Oil will become obsolete.

 

Um yeah. And you're um, "special".
So the answer to all our problems is just to attack every country that has oil.
And you claim I have a mental block?
Oookey dokey. I hope I always have a mental block that stops me from thinking the way you do!