It's The Energy, Stupid!

Energy is the earth's salary. We've been being paid for about 4 billion years, from our employer, the sun. For the first 3,999,999,799 years, we only used a very small portion of the salary and threw the rest in million year CDs. And each time one of those CDs matured, we just bought more. But now we cashing those things out. Like a gambling addict with a bad run at the table. Now those CDs are becoming scarce and we're trying to figure out how to spin gold from straw. It's as if we hired Enron to cook the energy books.

But thankfully, some people are starting to wonder, look a little closer.

Why is Europe always so cool? (see article link at the end of this post) I mean, they have manufacturers that love to pollute just as much as anywhere. Mercedes and Porsche produce cars that makes most American SUVs look positively green! The EU bureaucracies must have just as many crazy lobbists as the US Congress. So why is it that Europeans seem to actually look into things before jumping on the bandwagon and even if they do, they seem to be able to stop in their tracks and change course for the better?

My prediction: we will soon realize that much of any green hype is just an energy shell game, and will be forced to do two things to survive: bring up the standards of solar, wind and tidal to the efficency level of fossil fuels and concurrently cut our energy use in half. HALF! Then, each year, drop it by another percent.

There is hope. Fossil fuels have had 100 years to reach their efficency level (mostly in the past 30, as we've started to run out of the easy stuff) plus they were the main product on the market, so they had the production and distribution in place to work all the kinks out. As we get closer to $200 barrel oil, we'll start killing each other en masse for the stuff (as opposed to the few thousand or so we murder each year now). Then, maybe we'll start thinking about the way forward.

The article that inspired this post:
Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/business/worldbusiness/22biofuels.html?pagewanted=all