As numerous countries in Africa have shown, there is no economy without controlling and stabilizing the territory and the people on that territory.

At the end of 2007, Texas ranked No. 1 in the nation with installed wind power of 4,356 megawatts (and 1,238 under construction), far outdistancing California’s 2,439 megawatts (and 165 under construction)

One issue which the NYT article pointed out, is that in the US, the best source for wind energy, the Great Plains, is far from the population centers which use energy, necessitating investment in transmission lines.

The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academies of Sciences, recently published Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects. For those who are concerned about the effect of wind energy on bird populations, here is the study’s conclusion.

“Clearly, bird deaths caused by wind turbines are a minute fraction of the total anthropogenic bird deaths—less than 0.003% in 2003 based on the estimates of Erickson et al. (2005)”

That way, you don’t have potential scientific geniuses starving out in the streets of Zimbabwe because some dictator got it into his head he could be master of the universe.

With 6 billion people that don’t have to go working day jobs just to break bread, you have a much higher likelyhood of acquiring scientific talent given sheer statistics.

Iran, for example, is discouraging their women from entering universities. All the energy spent to hobble women in Iran could be spent towards researching productive fields for humanity.

The reason why fusion power, cold or hot, is so far into the future is because the earth being unified through fire and war are also far far into the future.

Unless something from outside the solar system introduces a new variable, the conditions that produced an American Civil War or the US Constitution, won’t repeat themselves for some time. And you need another America to produce scientific breakthroughs above what would be normally expected of warring states. Each state in the union does not worry about having to spend bucks on defense and spycraft to defend against their neighbors. All the energy that could have gone into competition now goes into cooperation. America, thus, functions entirely different from the rest of the world, whom are not in a state of being part of a unified polity. Europe, for example, with Kosovo and all, are still busy trying to compete and mess up each other. France and Russia and Britain have been doing this for centuries, wasting all the manpower and resources that could have been put into scientific and technological progression.

Now they speak of the European Union, the so called “non-expansionist” Empire. As if they deserve the title of empire in any shape or form given their squabbles.

Once we succeed in mastering fusion power, we have enough deuterium in our oceans for 150 billion years of power. It is incredibly safe - no possibility of meltdown or runaway - and as long as we stay away from using tritium, does not produce radioactive materials with long half-lives.

I think everyone is looking for a short-term answer to the problem, however. Not my pipe-dream of fusion…

Oil is marketed as a commodity, making the use of its energy very expensive. Production is constrained to keep the price high. As more and more of the world develops technologically, at current production rates, oil consumers will pay more and more of their GDP to oil producers. That is a very volatile situation geopolitically. Food, clothing and shelter are the three basic necessities, but in a technologal society energy and transportation are the fourth and fifth necessities. If the costs of energy rise and rise, energy and transportation consume more and more of our dollars - do you agree this will lead to crises in the near future?

I don’t have an answer. Oil requires refinement, and refineries are nasty places. No one wants refineries nearby. Yet we have to have them.

Anyway, to finish the thought, it’s amusing all the harping the MSM is doing about GW’s low approval ratings, and it’s even more amusing to see the democrats castigate him. (Pss’t! Hillary! Barry! Why are you running against him - he’s not running against you! In fact: he’s not running!) You know, that hole, deep or not, is entirely irrelevant to the man: he retires with a pretty good pension in ten months.

Like motivating professional athletes: you can’t. Win or lose, they’re paid.

It matters not how much oil is extractable from either the Alberta or the Colorado tar sands: the fact of the matter is that it will eventually be gone. If it isn’t gone in our life-times (which it isn’t, there’s plenty) still, it will be an issue for our great-great grandchildren to deal with. Or maybe only the one “great” grandkids - the point is: some day it’s going to be gone for someone. So knowing that, wouldn’t you think it might be smart to begin planning for something else?

A good part of the political problems throughout the world have been engendered because our idiot politicians have been cheerfully transferring much of the wealth of the western world into the hands of a bunch of fairly uncivilized camel jockeys for the last fifty years - which is something that should probably stop.

Is the problem at the breaking point? Don’t know, everybody’s point is different - but I do recall paying $8 a gallon in England and Italy in 1975, ‘76, & ‘77. Compared to that, current conditions are a breeze and in fact a bargain. If that’s engaging in Bookworm unwarranted optimism, well: it’s also engaging in simple truth: that’s what it cost there and then.

But I agree with how negative our thinking has become. Boy, it does seem as though there are a lot of things we “can’t” do these days, which is not the attitude for which this country became famous. I don’t know where the American “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” attitude has gone - but that is how problems are solved. When JFK announced we’d be on the moon in a decade, we barely had the ability to reliably get a guy into orbit. But you’ll note: we did it.

Today we might not. (Though I was really heartened when the Navy put a shot across the bows of Russia and China the other day by casually blowing the falling satellite apart - welcome to Star Wars, kids! The MSM and the politico-scientists were asking 17 paragraph questions ending in “can it be done?” to which the Navy was simply answering: “yeah.” When the time came, boom! “Yeah” is right!)

So we can still do stuff, but the paralysis in the face of declining oil has just been surprising. And it is, of course, primarily political paralysis. Individual people are out figuring out how to make salt water burn to produce power, but government? Waste of breath…