Friday, June 15, 2007

I recently received an email from my congressman asking what I felt was our top national priority. Here’s my response:

I believe that investing in alternative energy sources is incredibly important. Since the 80’s the world has found less oil and gas energy reserves each year than we consume each year. With demand for carbon-based fuels (oil) beginning to increase dramatically in China and India, worldwide demand will certainly far exceed supply driving the prices to genuinely hurtful levels (not $4.00 per gallon but $40.00 or more). We can already see China and India beginning to act politically to secure greater and greater supply. I believe that unless we find, distribute, and use alternatives to carbon-based-mobile-fuels, we will fight a world war with China before the middle of the century … probably within our lifetime.

Since bio-fuels made from corn or other food crops produce barely more energy than that required to produce them, I do not believe they are the answer. Plus, they have the downside of diverting food from areas of the world that are desperate for food. This widens the spread between well fed nations and starving ones. If bio-fuels really take off, desperately poor and starving countries will become worse off and may resort to a greater degree of political terrorism. Who can blame them? They have no other weapons and few options.

So what’s the answer? 1) Renewable energy, especially solar, wind and tidal energy; 2) Nuclear (mostly as a 50 year stop gap) – but re-engineered to be safer, and with a re-engineered waste disposal cycle; 3) Hydrogen as the mobile-fuel of the future, using hydrogen-suspension technology which would let us use today’s petroleum distribution infrastructure rather than building a new hydrogen distribution infrastructure; and 4) Relentless, aggressive conservation measures including a) legislatively mandated gas mileage increases, b) legislatively mandated penalties for equipment that consumes energy in passive (or stand-by) mode (e.g. the clock on your microwave oven consumes more energy than that used to cook food) c) aggressive building code standards to reduce residential and commercial energy consumption.

People are all fired up about Global Warming. The trouble with this is that it’s politically polarizing. Whether man is the culpret or not ... whether it matters that the world is warming or not ... WE MUST SOLVE THE ENERGY SUPPLY/DEMAND PROBLEM.

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Politics
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