America needs therapy

[Steve Schear]

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