Quote:
Originally Posted by sck5
You guys will get ideological about ANYTHING. The reason we switched from wood to coal was because we cut down all of the trees in Europe and most of the eastern forests in the US. Wood got expensive and so we switched to coal.
We then switched to oil because we mined most of the THEN AVAILABLE coal (which was anthracite, and mined in traditional tunnel mines) and IT got expensive. Yes, we now use lots of coal but that is because we have new technology (strip mining, hilltop removal, etc.) and also because we started using the bituminous coal, the anthracite having been nearly exhausted.
Why does this have to be a left right issue? Erps got it right that switches happen when the old fuel gets expensive. That calculation can change when new supplies are discovered or technologies change. That isnt political, its basic economics.\\
And if you believe that (and if you dont you are just denying reality) then it isnt too big a jump to the fact that sooner or later, we will run into increasing costs on the oil that is available with present technology and will start to switch to something else.
You can find plenty of conservative economists who will tell you exactly the same thing. It aint rocket science. It aint even politics.
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We quit using coal only for certain things. It certainly wasn't that we'd run out of coal, couldn't mine coal, or it got too expensive. We switched more and more to oil because we couldn't quite get that coal-burning lamp technology down and we had a later problem with the coal powered automobile as well. All along, we continued to use coal for power production as well as other industrial uses. We even powered ships with it until we found out that oil was more efficient.
Facts are pesky, but necessary, things. Try acquainting yourself with a few of them. (g)