omega

Energy Will Lead the Next Commodity Shortage

This author's general thesis of upcoming shortages in fossil fuels is quite plausible. Too bad he let's his reactionary political ideology get in the way of a dispassionate evaluation of our predicament. To rail ad nauseum against the environmental extremists is to completely miss the point of why we're in our present day fix. We could only wish that greenies had anything like that much power in our large-corporation dominated political system (almost as true with the Democrats as with the Republicans). If we'd only taken Jimmy Carter's environmental foresight seriously instead of tossing him out of office in favor of Reagan's deregulation of big business and decoupling of federal spending from any semblance of control, we'd be most of the way off foreign oil dependence and onto a variety of renewable energy sources at this juncture -- and probably without the Iraq & Afganistan foreign entanglements as well as the wrenching collapse of the house-of-cards American banking system selling ponzi scheme worthless paper to the rest of the world.

Anyway, all political biases aside, the US might as well bite the bullet now in our time of distress and upheaval and get onto a sustainable energy track. Anything less is just delaying the inevitable day of paying the piper. There's nothing radical about investing in an infrastructure based on technologies and systems that are sustainable, local and independent for the foreseeable future. Natural gas certainly fills some of the bill, but we're likely to discover very shortly that global climate change is not a shrill alarmist cry but an enormous issue that will dominate our struggle to survive as a species. Virtually every scientist in the world who isn't beholden to corporate entrenched interests via having their research funded by an energy company has come to that hair-raising conclusion. I'm always bemused that so many Americans are repeatedly brainwashed so easily by corporate special interest marketing. You'd think that in light of the widespread anger these days toward the big banks and the Fed in collusion with the politicians for ripping the rest of us off to line their own wallets, most Americans would be suspicious of other similarly powerful big industry groups. But no, we continue to buy into their self-serving disseminations as they paint their enemies (ie those who want to free the people from their choke holds) as extremists or worse. Wake up and start to think for yourselves, people!

Various sources of renewable energy are currently extremely cost competitive with new developments of non-renewables, whether we're talking oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear. And that's without even considering the enormous subsidies these entrenched industries are enjoying, from infrastructure buildouts to taxation policies, and from taxpayer funded liability insurance to our fighting foreign wars. The challenge with renewables is they require a mental shift: they have to be site specific -- what works in the Southwest sunbelt is different than what works on the windy great plains or the geothermally active mountains of Alaska. Once the initial capital outlay is made (and for example, wind energy is cheaper than even coal in this regard), the fuel is free and it's difficult for the existing big energy companies to rake in the same profits. So of course they're doing their level best to discredit this whole trend with massive disinformation. Remind anyone of the tobacco companies?