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This is why your section rules, Mr. Leonard. I'd not seen that kind of comparison, but it's revealing -- as ever, the petroleum industry will fight any change as long as they feasibly can, using whatever rhetoric they can muster, despite being on the wrong side of history. What I don't get in the discussion is how banking on fossil fuels is anything but a losing bet, long-term (above and beyond the obvious climate-change consideration). If the US was energy-smart (hahah, given our track record), we'd be putting serious R&D into wind and solar, the energy equivalent of a Manhattan Project.
The crisis in Florida the other day points to how wrongheaded centralized power is, especially in something like nuclear. Our government really favors centralization of power resources, even by supposedly decentralizing Republicans (like their notions of "fiscal responsibility" it's chimerical at best), even in alternative fuel sources. So, they like solar power if it's a centralized power plant, or nuclear, because it requires centralization. I'm sure they'd favor it with wind, too.
But if 9/11 taught us nothing as a country, it's that centralization is a risky policy to pursue in the age of terrorism, because power plants are such easy targets (I'm reminded of that time in Wyoming when a bird flew into a power station and shorted out power for like 23,000 people -- and that was just a bird). What the US needs is a new way of conceiving of energy resources, one that is decentralized, and alternative energy resources like wind and solar offer that, if only our government could wrap its bloated head around that.
Energy independence would get us out of the wars-around-the-world business, and energy decentralization would offer protection against the terrorists that the authorities like to invoke now and then, when politically useful. And things like solar and wind power would offer long-term security for the country's economic and environmental well-being, and would give us a lead in that as an industry.
But, instead, the "debate" continues by well-financed dead enders in the fossil fuel industry, or dead ends like the ethanol lobby, or worse, the coal industry.
