The Palin/McCain ticket not only doesn't get it, they will never get it. Oil is NOT the answer. I'll say that again - Oil is not the answer!

Obama is not much better, he is just bloviating on this issue. I am not impressed at all.

Forget the idiocy of biofuels - filling a gas tank with still polluting biofuel uses enough grain to feed a man for a YEAR. Solar, wind and tidal are part of the answer, but only part.

What we need a new Manhattan Project to find new sources of energy that is international in scope. This would be a real dream, an international project that most Americans could get behind. It would be a chance for America to take the lead again; in something other than military technology. And it has the real potential to end our energy problems, which are the root cause of wars, famine and so much human misery.

Unfortunately no one is talking about this. When was the last time you read an article about fusion power? Have you heard that it is entirely feasible to put a solar power station in orbit? As usual, the vested interests are keeping it tamped down, and now with, for the moment, lower fuel prices, we are losing momentum on the most important issue facing mankind.

"We will encourage Americans to be part of the solution by taking steps in their everyday lives that conserve more and use less."

Sounds like Jimmy Carter. Let's lower the speed limit.

Considering that Governor Palin was at a plant that makes solar panels for her speech, you would have expected her to say a lot more about increasing the use of alternative energy, instead of just talking about drilling things.

"What we need a new Manhattan Project to find new sources of energy that is international in scope. This would be a real dream,"

...and it already produced the energy source we need. Obama needs the resolve to tell the old hippies to go fuck themselves, and that we're going ahead and building the energy infrastructure we need now.

Palin's natural gas pipedream, if I'm not mistaken, is coming from Canada, not the U.S.

I'll bet oil prices will go up after the election ... I think there is some manipulation here, as they went down the last election to help W. At present, they are artificially low. But it mainly proves that reducing consumption reduces prices! Conservation rules.

They do 'mountaintop' removal in West Virginia and Kentucky to get the remaining coal. They are going to have to strip-mine vast sections of the West to get shale oil - they are already poisoning the water, killing the remaining animals and devastating the biosphere right now with shale projects in Colorado, Utah & Wyoming. This fits the picture of desperation as shale oil becomes the 'bonanza' on the back side of the peak oil curve. It is the equivalent of burning the living room furniture to get heat.

But there is money to be made, and a modern 'gold' rush can only be stopped by intelligent policies. McCain and Palin are the direct representatives of the oil/coal extractive industries lobby. You get what you vote for.

... and always has been. Obama is also pro-nuclear. What you smokin'?

The problem with doing something like that is there is no promising technologies that would make a crash program feasible. Now, there are some technologies which might give that. My current favorite is inertial electrostatic confinement for fusion. A proof of concept experiment was recently completed and the data is being evaluated right now. If it is promising, a few hundred million should be thrown at it to build a reactor to produce net gain of energy. Then we sprinkle the landscape with them.

Another thing we need to do is prospect the poles of the Moon. If there really is significant amounts of water there, and it can be feasibly recovered, then that could be a Manhattan style project to build a Moon base to make solar powered satellites. In addition, if the the above fusion reactor is practical, it possibly could be fueled with helium 3 which has been deposited on the Moon's surface by solar winds from the Sun.

The lunar water is important because that means nuclear thermal rockets can be used to move around. And those are very cheap to operate in space, dropping the costs of solar satellites even more.

We still need to do a little ground work before we jump into a big project. Things we arguably should have done before, but hadn't.

"Oil is NOT the answer."

That depends on what the question is.

Here in the USA, oil is mostly used for agriculture, transportation (cars, buses, diesel trains, aircraft, ships), home heating, and as a feedstock for plastics. Very little oil is used to make electricity here.

"Forget the idiocy of biofuels - filling a gas tank with still polluting biofuel uses enough grain to feed a man for a YEAR."

I don't think so. However, it's not a good thing for food and fuel to be competing against each other.

Where biofuels have a place is when they can be made from waste. Such as biogas methane from manure.

"Solar, wind and tidal are part of the answer, but only part."

They can be a very big part, though.

"What we need a new Manhattan Project to find new sources of energy that is international in scope. This would be a real dream, an international project that most Americans could get behind. It would be a chance for America to take the lead again; in something other than military technology."

If it's international in scope, we'd be competing with other countries that have lower labor rates and less environmental regulation. And we'd still be energy-dependent.

What's really needed is a long-term strategy to a sustainable techo-culture. Where everything works together, rather than the fragmentation we have now.

"And it has the real potential to end our energy problems, which are the root cause of wars, famine and so much human misery."

Part of the cause, not the whole cause.

"When was the last time you read an article about fusion power?"

Fusion is one of those technologies that has been ten years away for the past forty years. Maybe it will be feasible someday, but don't bet the farm on it.

"Have you heard that it is entirely feasible to put a solar power station in orbit? As usual, the vested interests are keeping it tamped down,"

NO. THAT'S NOT WHAT'S HAPPENING.

The solar-power-station-in-orbit thing has been around for decades. It's possible, but not practical. Here's why:

First off, the collector required to get industrial-level power is pretty large. Solar energy is about 1 kW per square meter, but you only get about 12% efficiency from solar panels, so you need about 9 square meters per kilowatt. So for a 100 megawatt collector you need about 900,000 square meters of area.

Once you've collected the energy, you have to get it to earth. How is that supposed to happen? How efficient will it be? Remember that for the solar power station to appear stationary in the sky, it must be about 27,000 miles above the equator. That's quite an extension cord!

Most of all, all the equipment for the station has to be manufactured on earth and rocketed into orbit. How much energy will that take?

There's also the fact that such technologies usually produce electricity, which means they don't reduce the use of oil. Electric airplanes and ships aren't practical yet.

"and now with, for the moment, lower fuel prices, we are losing momentum on the most important issue facing mankind."

Not really. The most important issue is sustainability. Energy is just part of that.

Ultimately humans must decide that the planet can only support X number of people at Y level of development, driven by technology Z. And technology Z has to be something that won't run out in the foreseeable future.