Free At Last

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek has some ideas about how the USA can achieve genuine energy independence. There is nothing really earth shaking here, but I think he takes a very common sense approach. Attitudes in our culture need to change.

I feel that economics is a major issue in bringing new forms of energy production into play. Right now, petroleum energy is relatively cheap and therefore, alternative technologies have less economic incentive. We need to remember that all this can change rapidly. Investing now, even with cheap petroleum is like starting a retirement savings account. You may miss the spending power now, but the pay off could be tremendous down the road. We can't afford to wait for a crisis.

I don't necessarily think the search for a silver bullet is wrong. Many ground breaking scientific discoveries have come about because of serendipity. We need to keep searching, but we don't need to lose our perspective and bet the bank account on some kind of miracle.