I've got a bone to pick... (Score 1)

People are turning it into a political football because most politicans believe they'll be dead before it hits so they don't care.

It is a political issue because the people who do the research are using Federal Grants. It is a political issue because politicians who want to have a strong subject to speak on are relying on ignorance and lack of definitive facts. We do not have enough information about this one way or the other at this point. There is research that suggests that our warming trend over the past century is part of a 10,000 year cycle. Obviously we can't prove or disprove that without tons of data which takes more than a few decades to obtain.

It'll cost us more in the long run but corporate america is interested in short term profits, period. It's like oil. For what we are spending across the board to defend big oil, subsidies, war, polution, we could switch to renewable sources.

It's easy to pick on big oil being defended overseas because we don't have much choice at the moment. It's easy to say that what we are paying to obtain and protect that foriegn oil could pay for the switch to renewable energy sources. The part you are leaving out is how we'll get from point A to point B. You can't stop cold turkey because our economy does run on oil. It takes time and billions of dollars to set up the power stations and infrastructure to make the switch, but in the meantime we have to keep our economy alive or its a moot point.

Since oil shortages are unavoidable Bush has responded by pushing coal. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. Why oil and coal? They are a physical resource and can be controlled.

Not even close but have a cigar anyway. There are oil shortages because politicians with an agenda stopped the big oil companies from creating any new domestic oil. We have more oil in the ground in the mainland US than all of the Middle East. If we had allowed big oil to tap into that a year ago we'd see a sudden drop in price at the pumps in roughly 8 more years. If they had tapped into that domestic oil 20 years ago we'd probably be paying between 30 and 40 cents per gallon (before tax).

As for coal, it is a domestic resource. The fact that we don't have to pay to ship it from overseas keeps the price low and that helps the market. Believe it or not, anything that helps the market helps the country. Its simple economics. If something costs less then more of it will be sold and the government taxes each sale directly and again on corporate profits.

Anyone that doesn't believe there is price fixing needs to look at the numbers. There's been a glut of oil, I read an article recently that they have run out of storage. The suspicous thing is the prices only dropped just before the US elections yet now shortly after the elections they are headed up again inspite of a surplus that has caused a severe shortage of oil storage space. Alternative sources will cause competition and drive oil prices down.

Yes, there is price fixing on oil but it isn't from anyone in the US. Perhaps you've heard of OPEC before? The price at the pump has nothing to do with stockpiles and vice versa. What does have a more immediate effect on the price of oil is terrorism and natural disasters inside of OPEC nations. If you believe that providing an alternative source of energy in itself will reduce the price of oil then you obviously didn't pay attention to how supply and demand really works. In order for you to use the alternate sources there is a massive amount of hardware and infrastructure that has to be put in place and that will cause the price of the alternative energy to be much higher than oil even at it's current price. If it costs more then it will have a low demand. That low demand would slow the process of providing supply which would cause the high price of the product to stretch over a longer period of time than it should. If that were not the case then why didn't electric cars become the norm decades ago? Recent advances in battery and computer technology makes the electric car more desireable, but the startup costs are killing demand for the time being. It will eventually become "affordable" for the average person to own an electric car, its just a matter of waiting on the see-saw effect of supply and demand to catch up with the desire. While it would be desirable for everyone to switch to more efficient products, most people shop by price instead of quality. And I don't care how good solar anything is for a home, it costs more to install so the people who build homes for profit will avoid it. When I build my own home it will be independant of outside utilities other than communications, and that's my choice to make not yours.