[sailaway21]

Bestfriend,
Why need there be any incentive other than the market? It shouldn't be government's job to decide for you what is economically feasible. Why should my tax dollars go to pay for your wind turbine and solar panels in Arizona? If they are efficient and there's money to be saved, you and the resident's of Arizona will be reaping the rewards. Are you going to send me a portion of the money saved? The bottom line with a lot of these things is that they are nowhere near as efficient as we'd like and there are political considerations as well. Just look up the difficulties being encountered by those endeavoring to build a wind farm off Cape Cod. NIMBY

Here in Michigan we went through the solar panel craze back in the seventies and eighties. All the salesmen were long gone before somebody figured out that Michigan doesn't get nearly enough sun to make the things work sufficient to even cover their cost. We do do a fair amount of ground water heat and the more usual geo-thermal.

Big oil has, contrary to your assertion, been highly ingenious. In an amazingly short period of time, in technological terms, they have provided you with an abundance of gas and fuel for your vehicle right in your very own neighborhood. You've got your pick of brands close by. Likewise, they've run natural gas lines throughout your neighborhood which means that you don't even have to have a truck come by and refill your natural gas or propane tank. Ingenuity? They won't let the oil companies drill offshore of your state so some of them drill in Long Beach and angle out five miles underground to offshore oil. Pretty ingenious, I'd say.

They drill for oil on the North Slope of Alaska and pump it through a pipeline over a thousand miles long to Prince William Sound. Then they load that oil and come down and moor off Carpenteria and pump it ashore to power plants. The alternative would be a limited shipping season to the north of Alaska in very small ships because there's no Californian port with a controlling depth of over forty feet. Pretty ingenious, I'd say.

The natural gas you heat with burns far cleaner than the wood stoves our great grandparents used. In 1936 the life expectancy of an American male was 63 years of age, today over 80 years. We get to worry about diesel fumes, radon, and the like today because we've improved the efficiencies of the other pollution emitters so much. We also live a great deal longer because of an improved diet. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables that the internal combustion engine has made sure are avialable at out local grocery year round. Pretty ingenious, I'd say.

And all those things were accomplished because of "greed". Somebody saw a way to make a buck off of something someone else wanted. And let's not forget that damn few of those people would be living in Arizona had not the petrochemical industry aided in the invention of air-conditioning.

Gas prices seem pretty high right now. But, every time I fill up, I see somebody walking out with a bottle of water that they just paid double the price per gallon for than they did their gas. And they could have taken a cup in and filled it from the sink nest to the coffee pot for free! Now there's your standard of living. We're willing to pay almost two bucks for something we get out of our tap at home for so little they have trouble metering it.

Capitalism has been very good to us. The greed, if there is any, is in expecting the government to do more for us than we're willing to pay for our ownselves.