[danjarch]

Cd, I could go item by item over the current state of just about every alternative energy source giving you good bad and ugly, but let me just say this is one of those great ideas that turns into a poor reality. And this is why.

1st, All the states that produce corn are going to fight for ethanol to be included, all the states that raise animals for consumtion or dairy cattle are going to fight like hell to exclude it.

2nd, All the states with lots of nuclear will fight real hard to have it included, Nuclear is pretty much developed you say, doesn't matter, we're talking major pork here.

3rd, The most out there, but reasonable ideas that probably would lead to some thing useful will be excluded while the crazy useless one will find there way in.

4th, You'd spend months just trying to get this though congress, it would come out the other side with all kinds of other regulations or other give-aways that had nothing to do with energy and doubled the cost.

5th, Unless you really are just planning to shovel out the dough with no intention of accountability then a quarter to a third of the money would have to go to enforcing and auditing whats being done with the rest.

6th, All this money going into the feds faves, would have a crippling effect on anything not funded, or anyone not able to meet the requirements of the fed. This would keep the real alternatives stuck in low gear so to speak, for years or decades to come.

A comparable story would be when we want a machine that would mimic the electromagnetic pulse given off by a nuclear bomb. Both us and russia we're stuck by a little piece of plastic. We needed a insulating material with property no one had ever seen before. Russia put five of they're top science teams on it. None where able to crack it.

Back home we bid it out. Detailed the specification and all and sent it off to the top research companies as well as posted it to the public. Fully expecting one of the majors like Dow, 3M or Bell labs to find the solution for us. A bit of a suprise when a small chemical company in Nebraska showed up with it. To add insult to injury, turns out the owner of the company had questionable qualifications as to whether he was even a chemist. Dosn't matter though. He got the job and we started testing all are army equiptment. Not the russians though, at least not untill EP generators had become fairly comon in American universities.

As to the current bailouts of the banking world. I believe if you look up how many negative responses your adverage representative got, you wouldn't think they'd keep trying this game. In the meantime, it remains to be seen if that bailout really helped us.