Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Energy - the great vulnerability

In the West we use an enormous amount of energy. The USA uses most of it. If we keep using it in this way, we will accelerate global warming, raise the sea level so much that many people will be homeless, run out of fossil fuel, and give the least stable, dictator prone parts of the world great power over us. Simply slowing growth is not enough. We must stop and reverse it. We need a set of policies which encourage sensible alternatives and penalize continued use of fossil fuels.

I have worked in the energy industry at a high level. We need to eliminate oil and coal powered plants, which are also dangerous in terms of lives lost mining coal. We must build more safe and moderate cost nuclear plants, hydro and wave powered plants can be helpful. We have to switch as much automobile fuel use to renewable fuels such as ethanol, or at least replace gasoline by clean diesel.

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