So, when are we going to get a Manhattan Project for renewable energy?

Jimmy Carter said the energy situation was the moral equivalent of war thirty years ago and we still haven't done anything serious about getting away from fossil fuels.

Since that time we have had three major wars and more minor ones than I care to think about or count.

Can we haz renewable energie naow plz?

kthxbai

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One can dream...

...that he doesn't have the courage to live up to Carter's principles.

Unless of course unless we are asked to sacrifice our young people and trillions of dollars in pointless war on the other side of the world..

That apparently makes you a "war president".

n/t

massive technological progress. Destructive technology, but technology none the less.

For some reason, the human condition has just never lent itself to doing prodigious, huge projects dedicated to overcoming massive obstacles during peacetime. The closest was probably the Apollo project, and that was in the context of a "Cold" war.

The push will not seriously be on until oil becomes too expensive to extract from the ground. The government could take care of that by simply leveling a 100% value-added tax to oil at every step of production. $20 a gallon gas would send the alternative energy industry into overdrive. The political will to do it is simply not there.

In order to get humans to pull together..

I'm starting to think that might not be such a bad idea.

"The government could take care of that by simply leveling a 100% value-added tax to oil at every step of production. $20 a gallon gas would send the alternative energy industry into overdrive. The political will to do it is simply not there."

It isn't that the "political will" isn't there. What isn't there is the willingness of the American people to support anything like this. In a democracy, you need the people to actually support political policies. You can be up to your eyeballs in "political will", but if the American people will throw you out on your ass for supporting such things then where does all that "political will" get you?

"For some reason, the human condition has just never lent itself to doing prodigious, huge projects dedicated to overcoming massive obstacles during peacetime. The closest was probably the Apollo project, and that was in the context of a 'Cold' war."

This is a good point. I'd say war makes people believe uncomfortable sacrifices are necessary like nothing else can do. War really does lead to amazing feats of human inventiveness - for good and ill.

because you're right: the first politician that tried to seriously peddle that would be voted out in a landslide. This is some, though by no means all, of what led to Jimmy Carter's 1980 defeat, the call for serious sacrifice in a time of (relative) peace. It's a conundrum, an irony you might say, of the way democracy works.

I think right after 9/11 there might have been some opportunity to break our dependence on oil and start serious steps to move toward alternative energy, but Bush told everyone to go shopping, and invaded Iraq instead. I guess we'll never know what could have been.

If the will of the people was the bar we might still have slavery, Jim Crow, we'd be speaking German, we'd have got out of Viet Nam much earlier, both wars would be over, Gore would have been President, and on and on.

Hell, we'd probably still be an English colony and there would have been no bailouts.

In fact our fossil fuel dependency is what is driving these conflicts.

War is not the missing ingredient here, leadership is.

Our populace is not..

When I was seven years old I got hold of a bunch of old National Geographics from the WWII years, every single issue had at least one and usually several articles about the war. There were war bonds, victory gardens, scrap metal drives and rationing of any number of commodities. Hell, there were no new cars or civilian trucks produced during WWII.

That was a population at war, now you can go for months at a time without being reminded in any way of our two ongoing invasions.

:thumbsup:

Our country is at war on several fronts and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Literally millions of people are being affected by these conflicts here and abroad.

It is absurd to call this "peacetime."

With trillions spent on these oil wars, every American citizen is affected, negatively in most cases as our crumbling infrastructure shows.

I agree that war can mobilize societies to accomplish incredible feats, but without leadership and vision, there will be no change.

Is that the costs of the wars, both human and economic, are being artfully and deliberately hidden from the American people.

I'm a former Marine as is my son in law, at the beginning of the conflicts he was very interested in what was going on, followed things closely, now he pays no attention to it at all from one month to the next, indeed he doesn't want to talk about it and will obviously change the subject if I try to raise it.

The fact that I predicted pretty much the way things were going to turn out before either war even started might have something to do with his reluctance to talk to me about these things, he thought I was an unpatriotic idiot back then.

would rather wage these wars to secure oil and gas resources than to develop an alternative.

The president has faced several historically momentous choices--healthcare, war, the environment, human rights---and each time he has sided with the status quo against innovation, change and breaking with past failures.

The answers are elsewhere.

But as I pointed out earlier, our population is not at war, which is why there is so little pressure to end the conflicts.

... but is anybody listening?

http://apolloalliance.org/

I've seen with my own eyes electric bus and light rail transportation in San Francisco.

High speed electric rail could replace a lot of oil burning airline traffic too.

We just have to do it.

Electricity is not a prime source of energy, it has to come from somewhere, fossil fuel, solar, nuclear, wind, wave, tidal, ocean thermal or wherever.

What we are lacking is the means of generating the electricity in a clean and renewable manner.

And keep in mind that the Manhattan Project was not just research, the building at Oak Ridge where the centrifuges to separate the isotopes of uranium were was the largest building on the planet at the time.

There's also enough existing waste to power the U.S. for a long, long time without digging up any more uranium. Nuclear reactors might be built to burn up existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons, plutonium, used fuel rods, depleted uranium, and thorium.

But it's not even about nuclear power. If we really want to solve this problem all we really have to do is ban fossil fuel power plants and oil imports. I'll bet we'd quickly figure out how to live without coal power plants and imported oil. We could probably do it within fifteen years and in a manner that would end the stagnation of our current economy.

We know what we have to do and we know how to do it. One thing is certain: if we don't quit the fossil fuel habit it's going to kill us.

:(

Or on Jan20, 2001.

Why it didn't happen on Jan20, 2009 is a mystery. Guess it was pawned off on a congress still in the grip of oil industry, including enough Dems to block serious initiatives. Bad decision of the WH. They should have made it an executive decision on day one.

at least that's what I would say based on past experience.