"...for dumbest post of the month."
An honor. There's some pretty formidable competition out there.
"If all one had to do is work for only 90 days and only dig a small trench, solar energy would work beautiful."
And yet, the two previous rovers worked for more than four years and died of natural causes, or so the TeeeVeeeeee told me.
Plus which, here's a random sampling via google of countries currently filling significant percentages of their electrical power needs from solar technologies, or who have ongoing solar macro-projects coming online within a year or less. These include Germany, Spain, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and other northern African countries where sunlight is plentiful and where there are few, if any, conventional power plants and virtually no delivery infrastructure (except to the dictator's palace and a few hundred of his most favored elites).
Ironically, German solar technology firms are targeting the US Southwest because they see it as an area with tremendous growth potential (meaning more money out the door and an even lousier balance of trade). This would be largely because everything BushCo touches turns directly to shit -- for all except them and their investment partners, of course.
In this case, the idea of bringing fossil fuels industry heavies together with a soulless cyborg clean-hands type of oilman and expecting anything remotely visionary to emerge is at least as dumb as expecting to leave a casino with a full wallet.
As with virtually all other Bushean initiatives and wingnut flights of fancy fobbed off on us as some sort of partially coherent policy by mass media's dumbification machines, this "strategy" was solely intended to pick our pockets and transfer the loot up the food chain.
And keep in mind that they're anything but incompetent; they're just very different. They have a sociopath's set of criteria for success and they're doing very well at meeting all objectives -- certainly since 9/11 gave them free reign to get in touch with every lousy little aspect of their inner fascists and malevolent imperialists. But I digress yet again...
Point being that, rather than kick off a crash program to change the US
energy consumption mix from the 85 percent derived from various fossil fuels in 2006 to, say, a goal of 85 percent derived from zero- or low-footprint renewables by 2010. And the really tough thing would be getting the horsepower and ergs and such now obtained from fossil fuels from sustainable sources instead. It's likely that these fuels don't currently exist in any useful form. That's why alternative energy R&D needs massive subsidies and, if necessary, full federal funding.
You think the welfare queens in the petroleum industry, dishing out all that bullshit about "free market forces" even as they grovel and snivel and threaten and whine to Uncle Sucker that there's never any such thing as enough and they need more and more and more money NOW or they'll hold their breath until they turn blue, and blah, blah, blah... whatever else disgustingly spoiled brats use to extort favors from incompetent parents.
Or, to put it a bit more concisely, do you think ExxonMobil is going to spend a dime on alternative energy R&D when all they have to do to clear a few billion more per quarter is make a couple of phone calls to their "competitors" at Chevron, BP, Shell et al, telling them what the plans are and suggesting they go along for the ride so nobody screws up the price fixing scam they've been running at least since I was an embryo.
The US still has quite a few incredibly brilliant researchers and gifted, creative engineers, although the Bushies' hostility to science has driven thousands overseas to countries where bird droppings and creationists share equal status.
Despite the religious nuts polluting various Bushean agencies, stem cell research continues unabated. Just not here. So instead of the US ending up among the world leaders in productizing the results of that research, doing some actual good for humanity for a change and making zillions into the bargain, the US will once again be subsidizing some other country's stem cell R&D and driving the US economy ever closer to third-world status.
Same with alternative energy -- solar I believe was the subject here some time ago. Maybe solar isn't the answer after all. Whatever: other countries will learn that lesson before the US does, and they'll learn how to use that knowledge to redirect their R&D efforts in more promising directions. Down the line, that's going to lead to new variation on technologies that support clean energy and produce goods and services the world wants and is willing to pay good money for.
This would be in sharp contrast to the leading export for the port of New York and New Jersey last year: used paper and cardboard headed for third world slave labor recycling pulp mills, closely followed by miscellaneous scrap metals destined for some indescribably hot and humid colossal complex of forges and furnaces, where spines crack and third-degree burns are a daily event -- a reeking monument to terminal toxicity, located right in the middle of the very worst place on earth.
USA! USA! Yup... we're sure as hell number one, alright. And then there's...
"For most of everything else? Oil is the only power source our idiotic congress has ponied up for."
No dispute there. If the invertebrate party had a nickel's worth of concern for anything but their careers and wallets, they would have told the Bushies to go to hell long ago. As it is, we're the ones in hell and they continue to make out like bandits.
For example, here's a
link to an opensecrets.org news release regarding the comfortable financial positions most member of congress find themselves in, even as the "little people" struggle to make ends meet. This actually caused to me to despise them even more -- which I thought was absolutely impossible. Happy reading.
wp
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