Most of those "alternative" sources you cited are *not* portable. You can't use tidal power to run your car - not without converting that electrical energy into some other form (chemical) and storing it in an expensive "tank" like a battery. We don't have a stitch of the infrastructure it would take to harvest any of those alternative sources, let alone convert, store and use them portably.

You're also not looking at the cost per kw/h. Solar still lags far behind other sources in most applications, for example. Sure, in theory you could carpet the earth in 100% efficient solar cells and generate enough energy to run ten planets. In practice there are no cells that efficient, there's not enough money on earth to build such a solar infrastructure, and doing so would wreck the environment. So it's a little misleading to look at the "total" amount of sunlight hitting the earth or the "total" amount of tidal energy (or whatever), and then extrapolating from that how much solar or tidal energy is actually available to us for conversion into electricity.

It's like saying that the global economy is worth trillions of dollars a year, so therefore you should *easily* be able to bring home a salary of a billion a year - after all, there are trillions upon trillions of dollars in circulation. Actually collecting a chunk of all that money flowing around is not quite as easy as sticking out your hand, though.

Sure, a working, realistic alternative energy infrastructure could all be built, for tens of trillions of dollars over decades. The problem is, we don't have either the tens of trillions or the decades.

Currently oil accounts for a whopping 38% of global energy use, with natural gas accounting for another 23%. That's over 60% of the energy we use as a species. Both resources are near, at or just past peak. Only about 8% of our energy comes from renewable resources. Getting that figure to 68% would take decades and trillions of dollars, even assuming some pretty impressive technological breakthroughs. It's certainly not going to happen with ease in the time allotted to us - well under one decade. Oil is already at $70 a barrel, even in the light of growing economic weakness in its #1 consumer (that's us).

The time to address this situation was in 1980, when it became clear to anyone with a pulse that oil and other the hydrocarbons were gonna run out someday, probably within our lifetimes. There was still time to increase efficiency and research alternative technologies. There was still time to repair and retrofit our decaying urban cores for a future without petroleum and gas. Instead infantile Americans voted for the Ronnie 'O Raygun cowboy fantasy, giving us three more decades of oil dependency and unsustainable suburban sprawl to cope with. The first thing that senile dumbass did when he hit Washington was rip the solar panels off the White House roof, and he and his Republican cronies followed it up by gutting energy efficiency regulation and renewable energy research. We're gonna pay the price for Republican free market oil slave idiocy for generations as a result.

I'm just amused by how obsessed the Judeo-Christian God supposedly is with little boys' wee wees.

Guess that helps to explain all the kiddie-f'ing priests . . .

"If we wait for comparable human data and it comes out like animal data, we aren't going to be breeding as a species."

I think I saw a movie about this . . .

You know, I don't have a problem with plastic goods designed for longterm use, like a plastic desk organizer, a plastic plant pot or a plastic clothes hamper. I think those are effective uses of plastic. If anything, it might ultimately be more resource and energy efficient to use plastics for these things as opposed to other items, simply because the plastics don't corrode, don't easily dent or break, and weigh less and cost less to ship. They also don't require potentially toxic paints or other finishes.

Disposable plastic junk on the other hand is a real problem, especially the stuff that can't even be recycled. Grocery bags, soda bottles and all that instant garbage, especially since it's somewhere between difficult to get many of those things recycled in much of the US. And if toxic crap really is leaking out of some plastics, that just makes them even more of a disaster.