Good post, Windy. Very well stated.
sck5,
Here's a couple of thoughts.
Smoking doesn't cause cancer. Smoking is assosciated with higher rates of cancer. We don't know what causes cancer.
Cancer research, btw, has been the biggest fraud ever perpetuated on the American taxpayer. We have spent trillions and we are absolutely no closer to discovering what causes a cell to turn cancerous Only now are a few scientists debating whether or not our entire approach to cancer research has been misguided, ie...we've been looking in the wrong areas all along. This is what you get when you have government research. Research that sets a course they are powerless to change. I might add that the medical community, including the pharmaceutical's, has no real interest in what actual causes cancer, all the money is in treating the symptoms! Think about it. You could even expand the topic to AIDS research which has followed a similar path, on your dime.
You are right in saying that a transition will likely be abrupt to oil's replacement. The market will make it abrupt. Oil will either become too expensive or a lower cost solution will be found. Simple and possibly an abrupt solution.
In the meantime, let's consider government's role in the matter. Because THAT'S what we're really talking about. Oil companies are actively researching alternative energy sources, including solar. Why wouldn't they? they're in the energy business, not necessarily just the oil business, and if you were confronted with, if not geological, then political reasons that your cash crop was about to expire you'd be looking for something new also.
So how does government treat those companies? Well, the hew and cry is for windfall profits taxes. Taxes that otherwise would have been spent on research as well as exploration. Instead, what you are espousing, is that government do the research. As mentioned above, we don't have a real good track record on government doing those things. More to the specific point, perhaps you'd like to look up the history of the synthetic
fuels program from the 1970's. You'll find massive amounts of money, perhaps in the trillions, invested by government in oil alternatives. You know what it got us? It got us $10/Qt synthetic motor oil that still is uncompetetive with natural motor oil, thirty years later! This is not a NASA moonshot project with certain limited goals. This is a project, the quest for a viable alternative
fuel, that is going to take unbelievably massive amounts of money to be invested. And most of that money is going to be wasted. Even wasted by private industry. What incentive is there for private industry to waste such massive amounts of money? Profit, the same incentive that inspired John D. Rockefeller to waste massive amounts of money to provide oil as an alternative fuel to Americans. And the breakthrough, assuming there is one, will likely come out of some future Bill Gate's garage! Please don't tell me your solution is to start searching out and subsidizing the nascent Bill Gates' of energy!
I've posted on bio-fuels earlier and if you have not read it, I'd recommend the excellent link detailing the economies of them. Cellulose, smellulose! Brazil is just a notch above a third world country. Does anyone have a calculator big enough to conceive of the amount of infastructure change that would be required to just collect, sort, and process all the available and viable sources of cellulose in the US? Here's another dirty little secret; recycling doesn't work. Except in a few narrowly defined areas, we spend more on pick-up, sorting, and processing than the cost of the raw materials. The vast majority of our garbage still goes to land-fills. Did you ever have a burn-barrel out back when you were a kid to burn the stuff that you didn't want to pay the garbage man to haul away? I did, and I can tell you that it took a bunch of time and effort to sort out the plastic, the glass, and the cans from the burnables. Nobody sorts their garbage that way anymore and you can't make them at double the disposal rates. And you can't pay someone to do it for them and make a profit on the job.
Guess what? Ragnar is correct. The implementation of the Global Warming action policy is the implementation of the institution's of the statist left. some even call it, Liberal Fascism. It is anti-American. It involves an elite few making far sweeping pronouncements and decisions for the rest of us and it will accomplish those things at the point of the government sword. It is cloaked in the language of the magnitude of the problem and the need for quick and massive action. The only time in the course of human events that that logic has had any rationality has been during times of invasion and war. That's why the terms, "War on Poverty, war on this or that" are so popular. Because those terms are rightly understood as signifying the rightful actions of government. Except there is no history of government EVER fighting a war on anything, other than one of a military nature, and winning. The founding father's knew this. That's why they proscribed the powers of the federal government so severely. The natural inclination of any government is to be despotic and that's why our Constitution is such a marvelous document-it's kept us largely free.
This is NOT an environmental debate nor an energy debate. those problems will be solved, to the extent they even exist. This is a political debate. And it's not even about your ability to buy and drive an SUV. That's about the last thing they'll take away from you. At that point it will be easy because you'll have already surrendered your freedom and your liberty, VOLUNTARILY!
