Charles Hugh Smith at Two Minds had a guest blogger yesterday:
The Bush Administration may have made a strategic error when it chose a primarily military response to 9/11. We’ve spent a couple trillion dollars in the decade since with precious little to show for the expense and effort. Would a national effort to develop renewable energy have had a greater impact? Probably not at the time—the slow pace of technological progress could not have competed with the primal thrill of military conquest.
But the tangible benefits of a renewable energy thrust would certainly be evident by now. Lower dependence on foreign oil imports, the rise of new technologies, the creation of new businesses and new jobs and a sense of a hope for a better future might be apparent today had the leadership of the time embraced the long view. And it could have been accomplished for a fraction of what we’ve paid to date for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The link I posted on Saturday got a lot of discussion on Facebook. One point was that there was an advantage to energy independence and that the Chevy Volt helps in this. I think that energy independence should be a national goal. This will require tariffs, which is not mentioned in the article at Two Minds. A good read anyway.