Political Reform
OK, enough about the environment, what about energy policy?
Well, we have already addressed what to do about electricity, so all that remains is to decide were to get our gasoline.
The beautiful thing about switching to nuclear energy is that all the coal fired power plants will go away, this improves our environment, but also lets us use that coal for other purposes. The IPP power plant an hour south of where I grew up consumes two 80 car train loads of coal per day, each car weighs over 80 tons.
A company in Utah developed a process that turns coal into gasoline at an equivalent price of about 30 dollars per barrel.
When was the last time oil was as low as $30 a barrel? 1970 maybe? Oil is over $100 a barrel right now. All that coal that is currently going to power plants can instead fill our gas tanks, and the gas tanks of our aircraft, giving us cheap gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel, and eliminating our dependance on foreign oil. One of the bonuses of coal is that if you spill it during transportation you just get a caterpillar and pick it back up. No messy oil spills from pipelines or ships. As our dependance on oil decreases we won't need to use deep water oil drilling which is dangerous and potentially disastrous. We can instead use our abundant coal supplemented by shallow water oil wells and our natural oil deposits that are land based. This plan is safer and cleaner for the environment than what we currently do while at the same time driving our gas prices down and completely eliminating our dependance on foreign oil. We might even see gas prices go back below $1.00/gallon.
Eventually we would hope to see electricity replace most of our gasoline and diesel use.
This could take years though as the technology for electric vehicles is very new compared to the internal combustion engine which has been around for over 150 years. Having the government spend some cash pushing electric car R&D will help here. There is no need to be in a rush in this project, since replacing all of our electricity production with 100% clean electricity will take at least 20 years anyway. There is no point in using an electric car if the electricity it uses is generated by burning coal.
Congratulations on making it to the bottom of the page. :)
Here are some reference videos on Obama's current environmental and energy policy.
Draw your own conclusions.
President Obama wants high gas prices, or he is at least ok with it.
Obama's hypocrisy on high gas prices. They were bad when they were Bush's fault, but now they are ok.
Obama's Energy Secretary stated he wanted gas prices to be over $8 per gallon.
Obama says he is ok with high gas prices, he just wishes it had been a more gradual change.
I'll leave you with one last point to consider. Federal and state taxes on gasoline are around 50 cents per gallon. The gas company probably isn't making more than 10 cents a gallon. That is an effective tax rate of 83% on the profit for each gallon. So why is Obama saying we need to tax oil companies more if they already pay 83% tax plus additional corporate tax?
Patrick Moore, founding member of GreenPeace put out this video documenting some of the problems with the global warming scare.