Random Acts of Mind by Dones

Here’s what I say:

The answer to high fuel prices must change from changing the supply to changing the demand. It starts at home, with gasoline conservation like James has outlined. We’ve got to start using less gasoline.

It continues from there to further investment and commitment for mass transit in urban and suburban areas. We’ve got to make sacrifices through lifestyle changes.

We must accept that ethanol from corn is not the answer.  Newsflash: we EAT corn. Corn syrup is the sweetener of choice in just about every processed food. It’s a feed crop for livestock as well. Using corn for ethanol may make economic sense in the near term for corporate farmers, but even if we were able to turn from fossil fuels to ethanol, it’ll only turn the agriculture corporations into neo oil barons who will control the prices of both fuel and food. But the fact is we couldn’trun our economy on corn-based ethanol anyway. So in my opinion, we shouldn’t even try. We certainly shouldn’t be subsidizing ethanol production from corn. If you want to grow a non-food plant and get ethanol from that, be my guest. But that is not our destination; it’s just a bump on the road to where we need to be headed…

We must only purchase used cars until the automakers get electric cars on the roads. Then we must only buy the most intelligently designed electric cars on the market. If we all vote with our wallets, the manufacturers will get the picture. Those companies that don’t figure out the new market will die like the dinosaurs they are. We must accept changes like this. We must decide that if General Motors (as an extreme example) doesn’t give us a well-designed electric car, we will drive them to Chapter 13. Then they can be purchased by another company that will use GM’s resources to provide us with the gas-free transportation that we need.

We need to exploit the technologies we have discovered in alternative energies such as wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy generation. We’ve got to start a new Green Industrial Revolution that runs off of the infinite clean resources we have at hand, instead of limited polluting resources that we rely on other nations to deliver to us.

We need to realize that 21st-century nuclear energy is not the 20th-century stuff of bombs or meltdowns, but a clean source of electricity. In the technology’s current generation (which as far as I can tell has yet to be exploited on American soil), a nuclear plant can safely produce more energy with far less waste than anything currently built. We need to get over our fears of nuclear power and give it a significant role in our future energy development.

This is about a 30-year period of time I’m thinking about: roughly the remainder of my working life. This is just what I could come up with off the top of my head. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

So we come to Barack Obama, who yesterday gave a speech (video below) outlining his solutions for the energy crisis. Please note the similarities to what I have stated above. We’re certainly not saying all the same things. For one, I’m not running for president and can afford to say wacky stuff off the cuff. I also don’t have a professional speechwriter encapsulating my thoughts and ideas for me. But let’s just say that I like what I see in him, and I wouldn’t mind hearing even more from him on this subject.

Highlights of the video:

• - A program equivalent to Kennedy’s moon shot
• - More economic stimulus checks & tax credits in the short term
• - Raising gas mileage standards requirements for automakers
• - Investing in new and emerging alternative energy technologies, thereby creating new jobs
• - Incentivizing oil companies to drill in places they are already allowed to drill
• - Eschewing gimmicks (admittedly a bit of a gimmicky slogan)
• - “It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to come overnight.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Politics, Current Events, Tech, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.