[Kevin M]

Originally Posted by sperry

I thought we were discussing ways to lower our dependency on foreign energy?

/retroactive OT tag

Originally Posted by sperry

Lowering CO2 is much easier to do via technology alone. But even with cleaner burning and electric cars, cleaner power plants, etc... the energy has to come from somewhere. The goal I was discussing is changing our use of oil into the use of something else local. Hence the mentioning of coal... like Mike said, there's plenty of energy right in the soil of the US in the form of coal to give us the time needed to develop next generation energy resources. Really, the only problem with coal power (assuming something like this can be made full scale) is that it's not renewable, just like oil... but oil's got so many other issues, mostly political.

I just get a chuckle out of a free society with a capitalist economy complaining about the price of something, when that price is resulting from our own gluttonous demand.

Originally Posted by sperry

So, burn coal for the next 20-40 years in a manner that doesn't hurt the environment more, then concurrently make the shift to nuclear/solar/wind/tide/geothermal/etc power. No more dependency on the middle east, no more need to dick-around w/ crap foreign policies to protect our oil supply, more jobs in the US building and maintaining these new clean coal and nuclear power plants... and we get the benefits sooner rather than later if we were to just bleed the earth dry of oil, while fighting wars so expensive we don't have the money to invest in new energy research.

Nothing wrong there.