Electric Vehicles In An Electric-Centric World- Part 11- Final Thoughts

FINAL THOUGHTS

The internal heat from earth's core is not going away anytime soon. Properly managed, geothermal reservoirs can reheat water on a continuous basis in perpetuity. The government must get out in front and drive this technology for he who is first with the most, usually takes the top economic prize.

The need for clean and sustainable energy self-sufficiency is an issue of national security, national survival, indeed even human survival. What is more important: Going to Mars or the survival of our nation and our planet? A "Mars shot" does not get us there. Energy self-sufficiency in clean renewable power sources does. Then we can worry about going to Mars. Did anyone at NASA really care about how much it would cost to go to the moon? How about the cost to go to Mars? Can we afford to do this? What is the dollar cost per mile of space travel? Ditto with regard to the Space Shuttle; despite it's tremendous costs, we still launch. More cogently, is our national defense predicated on how cheaply it can be done - on whether we can profit financially from the military activity? These are matters of such paramount importance that they do not become part of the cost-benefit analysis. These things are done - period. Because they must be done. The same dogged mind-set must exist to achieve energy self-sufficiency using sustainable and "green" alternatives as the source of fuel. We must look at this issue in a different way. We must strike the problem from different angles. We must upset the whole rotational axis of human thinking and place absolute need over raw cost. We must consider the idea that the Sun may just rise in West and set in the East.

Government must take the initiative. A good start: eliminate the 15 billion dollar corporate welfare subsidy that is annually provided to major oil companies - who collectively [through more than 200 billion dollars in 2007 profits] have more than sufficient personal funds to explore for and produce oil independent of this taxpayer largesse. This money should be earmarked to drill for heat instead of oil. We must start accessing this vast store of energy now - 50,000 times the amount of energy we presently consume. We have been blindly wandering in the wilderness, relying upon depletable and rapidly diminishing fossil fuel resources as our model for economic viability and national security. Essentially, we have been insanely roaming the decks of the Titanic wearing life preservers made of lead. The time to act is now.

Where does this "real" money come from? Well, the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] has forecast that our involvement in Iraq will cost this nation between 1.2 TRILLION dollars and 1.7 TRILLION dollars over the next ten years.⁴ Private economic models suggest the amount will be closer to 2.7 TRILLION dollars over that same span. Given the CBO's track record on forecasting future costs, it is wise to accept the higher figure. And that is probably a conservative estimate. What is a more prudent expenditure of our nation's treasure; spending it to secure our nation's energy independence and economic security or throwing it into the endless sump known as Iraq? Opt for the money being spent to drill for heat. The Department of Energy should immediately establish a one billion dollar research and development fund , and the tax code should be amended to confer a twenty billion dollar development credit, to jump start this absolutely essential endeavor.

In sum, there are only two issues which face us as human beings on this planet: energy and everything else. For, if we do not get the first issue right, everything else simply does not matter. For my money, opt for deep well binary geothermal energy: it is the "NEXT BIG THING".

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