Does anyone else think that cutting 20% gas usage over 10 years sound too soft? If this is a national security issue, we should treat it with a sense of urgency. Why not 10% less, right now?
BTW, I've added your link to my blogroll.
Cheers,
St. Jimbob
Welcome St. Jimbob!
I hate to throw a spanner into the works, but conservation is historically a pretty short-sighted and uneconomical strategy. Technological breakthroughs come through incentives created by profits and directed to entreprenurial types--not from think tanks, banks of government scientists. Conservation may be necessary in an emergency, but it is hardly a plan for the future... only the Dems and Greens (who see a future with FAR FEWER human beings in it) can think otherwise...
Thanks!
Conservation for it's own sake is not the point. Stuff "Peak Oil" and "Global Warming" issues for a moment, and let's look at the compromised position our nation is in, because of our appetite for foreign oil. OPEC, as a proxy for Islam, wouldn't have us by the short hairs if they knew we didn't need their oil so badly. We're over a different barrel with China, but the effects will be the same.
Necessity is the mother of Invention, n'est pas? Let's make it imperitive to find alternatives, which include curbing consumption, by forcing the issue. Let's do it for our country.
Oh I agree with you absolutely on the issues at stake... it's just that there are necessities and necessities in history...
I can give you countless examples from history: people do not innovate under pressure, but only with the prospect of tangible rewards... this is a datum of technology history and humanistic economics (E.F. Schumacher would agree with me totally.)
Govenment CAN help by making the market more transparent in these (and other) issues, and making the tax code more simple, and even, even, offering tax credits for investment in energy r&d (which they already do a lot of, much more, I understand, than under BJ by way of comparison).
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