Allen Fuller

Implementing Pickens' Plan for Public Energy Policy

Excellent article.

People (many of the commenters above) need to get past their political biases that color their view of the world. It's a whole different world now than even just a few years ago. The laissez-faire approach will cause more chaos than a smart directed policy. I'm conservative but I see the huge problem we face and if we don't move together as a nation, with smarter policies that SHIFT US INTENTIONALLY AWAY FROM FOSSIL FUELS, we'll be sunk. As it is, it is already a huge enough challenge that even if we could all get on the same page today it would still be difficult to avoid massive repercussions.

If we don't buckle down and voluntarily apply some short-term pain (relatively speaking; it could still be years or even decades), then we are in for some real long-term hurt.

I like the idea of shifting taxes away from income and onto fossil fuels. Some will say this will stifle economic growth. Earth to La-La-Land! It's being stifled already and if we don't manage the situation, not only economic growth but even economic SURVIVAL will be crushed. On the flip side, taxes on income also stifle economic growth, so by shifting from income tax to fuel tax we are just moving sideways, but with beneficial side effects (getting off our crack addiction to oil).

If we had plenty of time, I'd agree that a free-market solution would be best. But there is no longer time. And the market needs direction; in the past, oil set the direction for the market; but currently no single player or technology is big enough to give direction to the market. The result is that the market doesn't commit itself to a coherent course and instead tends to wander and waste time. How many alternative technologies were lost, or companies went under, because oil was too cheap for several decades after the 1970s? If we had followed through with a national policy that gave those technologies and companies a chance, we could have been fully prepared for this day already. More than that, we could have been exporting these new technologies to the world, instead of sending all our money overseas for a dinosaur of an energy source that has no future.

Pickens' plan is a great step in the right direction. I happen to think there are a few naive assumptions in it, but it will be much better than doing nothing (our CURRENT non-strategy). The main flaw is assuming that natural gas will continue to be abundant, and the second flaw is to fail to account for fluctuations in wind power production (at least, as far as I have examined his plan). These fluctuations become important the more wind power you use. It needs to be complemented with grid-scale energy storage solutions.

It's time to shift our thinking. We need to recognize oil for the precious, limited resource it is... there are certain things it does which we cannot feasibly replace yet. Instead of using it up as fast as possible at the cheapest market price, and then crashing our civilization when it is gone, we should be carefully managing it for both the present and the future. All possible uses of oil that can be replaced with renewables, should be replaced, as soon as we can. We need to leave some oil in the ground for future generations, for those uses for which we have no practical substitute for oil.