Hoffert

This guy's good:

Fixing global warming will be hard. Just the ticket to revitalize this nation and the world. As JFK put it at the beginning of the Apollo Program, “We choose to go to the Moon (and do the other things) not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to mobilize the best of our energies and skills.” New energy systems won’t spring into existence by market forces alone. Coal is too cheap. We’ll need carbon taxes, perhaps revenue-neutral ones ramping up over time; “cap-and-trade” schemes like those in the EU; or Keynesian pump-priming with some combination of government and private sector management and contractors doing the work, as in Apollo and military weapons programs. In the civil sector we have the National Highway Act passed under a Republican president, Eisenhower, by which interstates are built and maintained with federal tax money. Right now, we most need a scientifically literate US president well-advised in energy and climate with the vision to initiate massive programs to research, develop, demonstrate, diffuse and deploy carbon-neutral energy worldwide. A brain trust of talented engineers and scientists should run these programs, not bean counters.

An upbeat history lesson is the US mobilization to fight World War II begun in the midst of an economic depression with no significant military. By 1944, 50,000 planes a year were rolling off assembly lines. So too could wind turbines and solar modules. Funding is the least of our problems. Who remembers what WW II “cost” when the US ended-up economic superpower of “the American Century?” Does the question even make sense? Most needed now, as then, is a sense of urgency. Not paralytic terror, but a determination to face reality and get the job done. Political leaders should be banging on the table about this. We simply can’t maintain our civilization of six billion plus without massive power sources. Two billion are kept from starvation by grace of the “green revolution” based on energy-hogging fertilizers. However dark the threat of global warming, I remain an optimistic techno-nerd, an eternal geek pushing forward with technology toward the light.

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