The Green Energy Economy: What It Will Take to Get There—barriers go beyond technology

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http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/energy/2009/03/20/the-green-energy-economy-what-it-will-take-to-get-there.html

The Green Energy Economy: What It Will Take to Get There

Everyone agrees it's time to get serious about renewable energy, but the barriers go beyond technology

By Kent Garber
Posted March 20, 2009

To describe what's needed to wean the country off fossil fuels, people often use the word transition. As in "the transition to a clean-energy economy." But transition is too smooth. It suggests steadiness, even inevitability, as if the endpoint is predetermined.

The outcome of the tremendous push that's now underway to change how the United States and other countries obtain and consume energy is anything but predetermined. There are no definite answers to questions about the role one source of energy or another will play 15 or 20 years from now, no clear sense about the type of fuel (if any) people will put in their cars, no consensus on how quickly any of this can happen or at what cost.

Nor is the change likely to be smooth and quiet. Instead, it will probably be disruptive, breaking down existing ways of thinking and acting. Not that disruption is bad: Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Austro-Hungarian economist, once spoke of "creative destruction," whereby new technologies and ideas replace old ones, which themselves are overthrown by newer, more progressive ones.

Already, 2009 has been a year of visions, of prophecies. President Barack Obama's inaugural address offered one such vision: doubling http://www.usnews.com/sections/news/energy/index.html">alternative energy production in the next three years, updating and expanding the nation's energy infrastructure, saving billions of dollars in energy costs through improved energy efficiency. Think tanks, businesses, industry groups, and environmentalists have laid out their own plans, some more aggressive and some less so.

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