Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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I agree, RealName
[Read the article: Oil prices: You ain't seen nuthin' yet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They are years or decades away. But they will still be years or decades away no matter when we start, so we need to start taking radical action as soon as possible.
Relying on market forces, as suggested by other posters, assumes a perfect market which we do not have. It might have worked if we had really gotten started on this back in the 70's, when we should have, but we didn't. Nothing substantive was done to encourage centralization - the first step would have been convincing major employers to move back into urban areas, causing workers and then small businesses to follow - or pursue alternative energy sources. Didn't happen. Even easy technological solutions weren't followed up on. There is not even one arcology in the US. The closest thing we have is actually the oldest neighborhoods in our oldest cities, ironically.
Part of the problem is cultural, sure, but mostly its corporate and political. We have known that reliance on oil was a problem for over 30 years. 5 different Presidents and thousands of congressmen have done nothing. The argument is that the citizens didn't think it was important, but in that time we have had literally hundreds of fiscal and social programs jammed down our throats that we thought were either unimportant or not in our best interests.
This suggests outside forces at play, and the likely culprit is the oil industry. They are the only ones who stood to gain from us standing pat as we were led into crisis.
If that is the case, there is one obvious though somewhat distasteful solution: Declare a national emergency and nationalize the oil companies until there are viable alternatives to oil and they have been made available to the public. Devote all of their profits, all of their engineers and scientists, and all of their knowledge of energy sources (they know more than anybody) to solving the problem they were largely responsible for creating. And implement rock solid guarantees that they will be privatized again as soon as they are ready to begin producing and distributing whatever alternatives we come up with.
As I said, distasteful for people who consider themselves capitalists. But energy has never been a free market, and has never been at the mercy of market forces. We recognized this years ago when we broke up Standard Oil, but over the years we have allowed the monopoly to be replaced by a cartel - a cartel where 2 of the biggest players, BP and Shell, are foreign owned - and then allowed the cartel enormous and undue influence over public policy. We can't win by playing by the rules when they won't.
It would take strong leadership to do something like this and not let it turn into a bureaucratic quagmire, and we haven't had leadership like that in decades. But we'll need that kind of leadership to solve this problem no matter what direction we take, so everything starts there.
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A good start
[Read the article: Oil prices: You ain't seen nuthin' yet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The first step is going to be treating this as a resource problem, not a political problem. Your idea is a good one. I would add to that some sort of tit for tat, give the oil companies what they need to increase production and reduce dependence on basically hostile nations for oil in exchange for them devoting x billions of dollars to research and production of alternatives. Makes sense for them because we would naturally be using our reserves faster and this would give them a start on the new energy industry that will eventually have to replace oil anyway. Doesn't require politicians with no ties to oil :)
As for minerals and metals (other poster), believe it or not we have been working on that for years. We already have the technology to mine space and we know how to do it, just have to start the programs and fund them so it will be cheap enough when we need it to be. Mining asteroids is a fairly straightforward solution to the mineral and metal problem, one that we know will work.
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It all fits together :)
[Read the article: Oil prices: You ain't seen nuthin' yet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Carbon nanotubes give us space elevators, reducing transport costs from $20,000 per pound to $100 per pound. Fission power can give us the electricity to run them, until we have fusion power - we have lots of energy to use for stationary applications. Launching from and unloading in space reduces the energy budget for space flight. The base stations for the elevators become real space stations and space exploration takes off, eventually reducing pressures from overpopulation and reducing total energy demand on Earth. The requirements of the expanded space program itself increases demand for metals enough to make nearly any asteroid profitable.
We know what to do. In some cases we are waiting on technology, in others we just need the will to proceed.