At 10:13 AM 10/1/2001 -0400, you wrote:
Until Sep. 11, at least, we may have adopted a cost-benefit approach. Non-oil fuels are far more expensive, and more radical approaches like wiring homes for solar would be quite intrusive and also expensive.
While I agree that all non-oil energy has, until recently, been more expensive its been a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you don't make the investments or provide the incentives to innovation then progress is slow or stopped. Breakthroughs in efficiency and economics are finally being made but their delayed arrival can be laid directly on the doorstep of Congress and past administration inattention. -Wind power is finally competitive with on-grid fossil fuel plants (i.e. $0.04 - $0.05/KWh). -Improvements in fuel cell efficiency and fuel choice http://www.llnl.gov/str/June01/Cooper.html should make them competitive within a decade for transportation, on-grid and off-grid applications. -Solar, while still not yet competitive with fossil fuel on-grid is steadily improving. (Off-grid its already competitive.) Recent, non-public developments, should enable substantial commercial breakthroughs soon.
So perhaps (note I'm not saying our politicos were actually this smart or that this is good foreign policy) the thinking was that by interfering in the middle east, which has a high cost, the benefits of cheap oil justified it.
As Tim and others have pointed out oil only looks cheap if all the costs are not exposed at the pump. The most cost-effective measures to energy reform are conservation but since consumers and business have been shielded from directly/visibly bearing much of the true costs for petroleum-based power production the market signals were absent and conservation was too often ignored. A link to what could be saved with reasonable and currently available consumer and commercial choices http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid509.php One of the philosophical sources for RMI is Natural Capitalism http://www.natcap.org/ Has anyone on the list read this work or have an opinion? steve