TonyCinTX

Fed Rate Cuts Backfire, Lift Gold and Oil into Orbit

pharma: No, democrats don't offer much. The only thing that can save us is getting off of Middle-Eastern oil; which means reducing our oil consumption about 45%. (A good portion of our oil comes from Canada and South America).

The only plausible method I know of doing that domestically is not solar, wind, biofuel, coal, nuclear or hydro. Those things have their places and their problems; such as exotic materials, intermittency, lack of infrastructure and pollution and environmental impact and waste problems. The answer is simply geothermal.

It is green, emissions free, environmentally neutral with a tiny plant footprint, requiring zero fuel delivery, available throughout the USA (at different depths), tested for decades, cheap to build requiring zero advanced technology and consisting of primarily steel and copper, and if terrorists attacked it they would just disrupt one plant on a grid and mess up a hole in the ground. On top of all that, MIT estimates (2007) indicate that with a little research we can produce geothermal electricity at a break-even of about half of current retail costs, and our untapped geothermal assets are capable of producing 2000 times the entire USA energy budget annually, and they never run out. If you like hydrogen fuel cells to replace gasoline, the geothermal electricity can be used to do the splitting. It can also be used to desalinate sea water, and pump the fresh water anywhere we want it.

Of course no candidate is talking about it, because it isn't sexy and doesn't fit into the current subsidy structure, and coal fired and gas fired CO2 spewing plants aren't easily retro-fitted, and those coal miners and oil barons wouldn't be happy if we made them obsolete, and those farmers counting on producing even more CO2 generating biofuels don't want to give up their subsidies.

Geothermal is the only viable solution. Plants can be built in parallel in practically every county in the country and operational within 6 months, they can even be located in the heart of cities. One thing oil HAS taught us is how to drill ANYWHERE.

And like I said, we don't need full energy independence, or even independence from all oil. Just the 45% that creates the threats we face to security and blackmail. But whatever, we will probably just keep pretending to address the problem by building windmills that can't generate more than 5% of what we need, and talking about solar that can't generate more than 5% either (and much of which cannot be built because the world supply of the exotic metals needed doesn't exist), or keep talking about biofuels that we cannot even prove break even and steal farmland and create CO2 concerns just as bad as burning coal. I suppose it will take an energy depression to make us actually look at the problem like adults.