Reply #160: Peak oil is a myth...

[ddeclue]

72% of the Earth's surface is under an ocean. There is simply no way that we've even come close to tapping the available oil. Nor for that matter the supply of shale oil or synthetic oil from coal. There is plenty of oil and there will be for well over 100 years.

The issue is NOT 'peak oil' it is global warming and foreign relations. We need to switch to electrically powered vehicles but that isn't going to happen in 6 months. For most people their car is their second largest investment besides their home and they aren't going to willingly flush 20,000 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of their money down the drain because YOU want to raise their taxes. NO instead they are going to fire you if you are a politician or fire whomever you support.

The solution is NOT sticks.

The solution is carrots.

Offer people tax incentives to buy more fuel efficient, flex fuel hybrid, and electric cars. Your "solution" is exactly the kind of "solution" we don't need when we are trying to build a consensus to govern.

We do need to invest in alternative energy and we need to offer incentives to do it...However...

We in America need to get over our irrational nuclear phobia. All the other industrialized nations derive 2 to 3 times the percentage of THEIR electrical power from nuclear that we do in the USA. It may seem counter-intuitive to many of you but nuclear power actually has a far safer safety record than hydroelectric dams in our country. We've had quite a few collapse in the last 100+ years of their existence and cumulatively they've killed well over 1,000 people. There has never been a death from a commercial nuke plant accident in this country and even in Chernobyl which had a far less safe design than used in the US and which even THEN required deliberate acts to result in a meltdown, only 50 people died from the effects of it.

CO2 has NO half life - it is a stable molecular compound that will stick around until a plant converts it back to O2. The waste from a single coal fired plant takes whole railroad trains to haul away and actually releases far more heavy metal and radioactive particulates into the air than all the nuke plants in US history combined every single day - simply based on the huge volume of coal consumed.

Douglas J. De Clue
Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology