Alternative energy wasn't possible at .37 cents a gallon of gas. It wasn't feasable at 78 cents a gallon and just not quite worth doing at $1.47 a gallon of gas. Now, guys. Take a look. Gas is more than $3.00 a gallon. So, bring out the alternate energy sources. Come on. Where are these wonderful, gas-saving, energy-crisis rescue resources? Ooops! We didn't get them going, did we?
That's right folks. We had a chance to get ready for the energy crunch and what did we do? We built SUV's, we advertised SUV's, we made owing an SUV a status symbol, we bought SUV's at an incredible rate. Even Lincoln and Cadillac built SUV's and then there was the Hummer. Instead of getting ready for the energy crunch everyone knew was going to happen, we dived off the deep end of the oil patch and sucked up the energy as though there was no end in sight. Talk about grasshoppers when we should have been ants.
So now there's no alternative. Now there's no refineries converting potatoes or corn to methane. Now there's no natural gas (no matter the amazing abundance of it in the ground and being wasted). Now, there's no alternate energy resource sitting in the closet ready to ease the crunch. Are we really that stupid as a nation? Looks like it.
We could be converting natural gas to methane. Yes, we lose 30 or 40 percent of the energy in doing so but we are getting a useable resource at a needed time. We didn't get any refinery set up for that. Even though we are pushing cubic miles of natural gas back into the ground in the Alaskan North Slope and using a lot of energy to do so, we still won't (didn't) take the foresight to prepare for the actual use of the natural gas. We could use that natural gas to alleviate the heating costs of those in the northern US this winter. Won't happen, we didn't do it.
We could simply open up the strategic resource stockpile of methane (you remember that, it works like gasoline) that we SHOULD have been producing over the last 20 years to make sure we could weather an oil price hike or an Arab boycott without crashing our economy. The farmers would have profited, more jobs would have been produced, and we wouldn't have to fret over the Islamic-governed oil of the Middle East. We don't have the methane, we didn't do it.
We could have spent billions on battery storage capacity to provide battery power for vehicles that actually work and are low cost for any replacement. Nah! Why bother? We have all this gasoline. Let's buy another SUV. It's difficult to believe we can improve computer storage at the expanding rate we are doing but cannot improve battery storage at a similar rate - - - if we wanted to. Well, folks, we didn't want to. We don't have battery power that is cheap and effective. We didn't even try.
Hydrogen powered vehicles? It was mentioned. George the Second actually made a pitch for it. I guess we can quit blaming him for all our ills. We've made our own ills and now we can't stand up for what we've done to ourselves and have to blame someone else. Ok, George II has been blamed for everything else so go ahead. The real problem has been the American People. We didn't get ready. We didn't even try. Now, our whole economy may crash and we'll make George Bush a new Hoover. It wasn't him, it was all of us.
1 comment:
I get a sense that the public is becoming more and more receptive to alternative energy products and services. The price of gas is certainly helping fuel the interest.
I think it's going to take education and more R&D from companies to get products to a point where they're easy to use, understand and are affordable to the masses.
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