On May 3, 2010, at 12:49 AM, Doug Pensinger wrote:
Beyond that, you're right, we should stop using fossil fuels as quickly as is practicable. I favor large state and federal taxes on gas and oil to subsidize research and development on alternatives and the development of mass transit. Maybe in light of this debacle a few more people will see it my way.
There was research on exactly that sort of strategy, a few decades ago. Then it went out of style and what research there was was starved of funding and allowed to die, and we went right back to the old habits. Wind/solar energy resources are still seen as hippie fringe science in the parts of the world where oil is still king, and oil production is still the vast majority of our energy investment.
The problem is one of attitudes, and fickle and unstable ones at that. The large scale investment in alternative energy sources had support mainly because people had fresh memories of the 1973 oil embargo, and as soon as it looked like Saudi oil was back on the table, the support for developing alternative energy faded out and oil was back in business. As soon as people couldn't see anything scary right in front of their faces, they forgot the bigger picture.
Proposing a fundamental change in how humans do anything is never easy, and always has to fight this tendency to go right back to old habits once immediate crises are over, especially given the conservative and refractory nature of upper level management in the oil industry. There are a lot of people who think the way you and I do (and we agree on a lot!), but entirely too few of them are in decision making capacities when it comes to this sort of thing ..
"A city built on rock 'n roll would be structurally unsound." -- Julie Maier
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