Letters to the Editor
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Here come a few suggestions on this:
1 - pass and enforce strict fraud regulation regarding the misleading of the American population. We have laws that prevent someone from crying "fire" in a crowded theater, there should even greater penalties to bring down the fraudulent and deceiving "research" institutions for costing us lives for their own profit.
2 - go nuclear. Replace every single coal plant with nuclear-generated capacity. We have the technology, we have the money, and we can do the research to improve our process. I know a lot of people get worried about nukes, but at this stage of the game, it's less risky overall. Once we're underway, help China, Russia and India follow suit. France has made great strides in making fusion technology work - let's improve it more and eventually we can skip fission.
3 - go electric. Set up big incentives to buy personal electric transportation that gets people off the gas and on the grid. Tax the hell out of gasoline (diesel can follow later, once an effective large transport can be built on electrics) to get those freaking SUVs off the road. Oil should go into making plastics, not belched into the air.
4 - go public. Start spending money on large-scale pubic transport systems that can be as or more affordable and safe than current gas-vehicle transportation.
5 - find carbon sinks. Sequestrate every bit of carbon we can through smoke filters, planting forests, providing incentives to Brazil, Indonesia, and other rainforest nations to cease cutting, etc. We've got six and a half billion people on this rock. Someone's gotta have some cool ideas on how to do this - make an "X Prize" for carbon sequestration, not some bullshit tourist spaceflight.
6 - fund this all. Know how? Cut military spending. We currently outspend the top 18 countries behind us combined, if I remember correctly. What do we need that for? We can flatten any country that actually attacks us, and dealing with yokel terrorists should be a global law-enforcement issue. Cut our military spending by half over five years. Don't tell me that Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed, and the rest can't re-tool themselves to start coming up with viable commercial products. If they can't, they don't deserve to survive.
7 - this goes back to my own personal politics, but kill the GOP. While they used to have a laudable function, they exist now as a combination corporate shill and haven for religious whack-jobs, neither of which allow facts to clutter up their personal fantasy world. Ridicule any Republican you know. Make them abandon the party. There's nothing wrong with being genuinely conservative, but the die-hard crazies have got to be marginalized. The time for being polite to these pricks is over. Their opinions deserve no respect whatsoever. Know a Republican? Ask them why they're still Republican. There is no sane answer to that question any longer.
I'm sure I could come up with more, but I don't have time to list them all. Maybe I'll blog it later.
T
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re: Regulation IMPROVES Our Economy.
Anonymous,
"Enron cost us money. The S&L bail out cost us money. The ADM price-fixing scandal cost us money.If you want to go back you could make a very serious arguement (and many historians have!) that slavery, child labor and a lack of labor laws in general STUNTED our technological innovation. Why create a more efficent machine or technique when slaves are cheaper? Historically the biggest innovations always come after the government raises the standard. THAT'S when companies start to brainstorm and hustle and work to make things more efficent and cleaner."
The bailouts were not in keeping with a true conservatives' beliefs that a company should either sink or swim on their own. The companies you mention SHOULD have gone out of business WITHOUT any bailouts. As for child labor laws, I again believe the morality of the people were forcing this to occur before the government even intervened. The government (as is usually the case) was slow to react but the people were already making the changes you mention above with their dollars.
"Historically the conservative economic theory has done more damage to our economy than anything else." I absolutely disagree with this statement.
"Getting back to climate change -- no company in America will willingly reduce their pollution or emissions beyond the minimum set by the government. So the solution is obvious -- the goverment must raise the minimum standard."
Humm...I don't recall see any government regulation concerning hybrid cars, yet they are now available. The point is, businesses react to the consumers far faster than they do the government. So if consumers want their cars to have reduced pollution or emissions, the companies will comply because the consumer demands it.
This is capitalism at work.
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Every Dollar Spent On A New Oil Refinery Is One Dollar Less For Building Renewable Energy Capacity
Ok...I have no problem with being energy independent. Yet you seem to discount the fact that drilling for oil in the US and building more refineries in the US would accomplish the same thing in a more economical way.
We're trying to reduce pollution and drilling for oil and building refineries are very, very polluting. So spending more money on oil as opposed to investing in renewables make no sense.
Thanks to the massive amounts of money the Iraq Occupation is eating up every day -- there really isn't enough money left to invest in both new oil refineries and building new renewable energy plants and infrastructure.
Why throw billions of dollars buying DOS programs when we're trying to upgrade to Windows XP (in terms of energy)? Oil and coal are dirty and deeply inefficent. Sure they were great back in the 1930's -- but we need a 21st century modern energy supply. Coal and oil are just too dirty and too inefficent when compared to solar and wind and geo-thermal.
We need to start treating renewable energy as a priority -- and if there is any money left after that, sure, I'll throw a couple bucks at the oil companies. But it's important to get the priority straight: renewable energy first, oil and coal a distant second. Those guys get what is left (if anything).