I can't believe I'm saying this but mongoose might have a small point, no doubt a point he made unwittingly....
I don't think politicians are the right people we should be looking towards for solving energy crises. Its not just climate change, its the depletion of oil and the outpacing demand versus supply. In each case its our underlying foundational sources of energy that is the problem.
from a
times uk article....
Quote:
This is not the postapocalyptic vision of some film-maker, but a realistic scenario as Britain grapples with a looming energy crisis. The statistics are frightening. In only eight years, demand for energy could outstrip supply by 23% at peak times, according to a study by the consultant Logica CMG. The loss to the economy could be £108 billion each year.
“The idea of the lights going out is not a fantasy. People seem to accept that security of energy supply is a right. It is not. The industry will have to work hard to maintain supply and for that we need a clear framework,” said Simon Skillings, director of strategy and energy policy at Eon UK, Britain’s largest integrated energy company.
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The UK has two worn out nuclear reactors about to be scrapped, coal has been increasingly replaced by gas from the north sea to generate power, but those stocks are dwindling.
Maybe a suite of incentives, subsidies, taxes, and carbon caps, can steer the western free-ish markets into the right direction without shocking them, and that's assuming that maybe those attending cophenhagen are smart enough to figure out the recipe, and that's assuming that maybe they'll all agree and not have it cause more political hinderence through negative reactions. But that's a lot of maybes.
If I were Obama, I would say, oi. chill. I've got 600 billion dollars to spend that miraculously didn't go to the banks and the iraq war to invest in massive, unprecedented investment to engineering and scientific research outside of any corporate or political obligations.