The Occasional Observer

Back after being on vaca for a week.. MB, loved the hand signals, particularly unwashed and pansy. Great stuff!

As for global warming, the current ethanol/food crisis is what you get when you have a bunch of tree huggers who don't understand science driving policy. (Although to be fair, Bush bears a lot of blame here because his energy-independence policy is weak and has a lot of focus on ethanol.) I doubt you'll find anyone who wouldn't be thrilled to snap their fingers and replace our present sources of energy with sources that are 100% renewable and 100% obtainable in the U.S.

The problem is, at what cost? Certain choices (such as corn-derived ethanol) have a huge penalty associated in the form of food impact, while other choices (such as solar) have a huge cost penalty at present. However, in their haste to simply "change" things, you have people racing to implement "solutions" before they have been fully vetted. The upshot is what you see today with the global food crisis. Instead, a more considered and gradual approach needs to be implemented. The new president of MIT has made energy research the #1 priority, but as they have pointed out we typically have ~50 year energy cycles. That is, if you want to go away from oil and coal that's fine, but you have to be thinking along a 50 year timeline, not 5 years. You are simply not going to be able to replace existing infrastructure in a cost-effective fashion in less than 20 years, at a minimum.

Of course, no one in Washington will EVER spell out a policy that takes 1-2 generations to implement. They want something that can be accomplished in a 4-year cycle. However, short of a doubling or tripling of the price of a barrel of oil from its current $120, this is not possible. In my opinion, we have time to continue to develop alternative energy sources and make them more cost-effective before shoving them down the consumer's throat at an inflated price. If we truly needed to make all these changes today to avoid catastrophic climate change, then the reality is we only have one option: conservation. Everyone would have to cut their consumption by 30-50%, period.

And, if the crisis was as imminent as Al Gore claims to believe, why would he continue to own and fly a private jet (one of the biggest sources of pollution pound for pound) and live in an enormous mansion??? The same goes for Schwarzenegger and others, who are complete hypocrites.