>>I used to find Denis Miller bright and insightful with his humor. Over the last year or so he has started to become...um... less insightful and more of an uninformed whiner. He did not understand that the California energy crisis was caused by deregulated power plants gouging the consumers. He thought that environmentalists were preventing the building of new plants.
>
>He is correct about the prevention of the building of power plants in Cal over the past 10 or more years despite exploding population growth. Deregulation had nothing to do with it. Hell, they even blame Texas for their problems. Blaming everything but the truth. Now, they are faced with possibly having to build nuclear power plants which, IMO, is the best solution because it is the cleanest and cheapest form of energy despite the generation of spent fuel rods.

While I don't often agree with Miller politically, I, too, think he is correct on this one. You can't shut down powerplant production for 20+ years while population is growing exponentially and then have everyone expect to get something when they throw a switch.

But, building more power generation plants is not the whole solution. Contrary to popular opinion, we are on the downside of fossil fuel energy usage - we are consuming resources faster than our reservers are building up. This is no suprise. M. King Hubbert predicted it more than 50 years ago. He predicted that the US production of oil would peak around 1969 and the world would peak around 2000. He was right on both esitmates.

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert

I first heard about this more than 25 years ago, researching the Arab oil embargo. An article by Dr Bartlett, now retired from the Univ. of Colorado Physics dept., entitled "Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis" was an eye opener. One sentence says it all: "Farming is just a way of using land to convert OIL into FOOD." Think about it. It now takes 7 times more energy to bring a slice of bread to your breakfast table than the energy your body obtains by eating it.

Your highschool kids will consume the entire remaining fossil fuel reserve in their lifetime, that is, within the next 40 years. Long before then the effects of dwindling fossil fuel supplies will make its presence felt. And, even if by some miracle, we were able to find 10 TIMES more RECOVERABLE fossiel fuel reserves than is now known to exist (including hydrated Methane, which would be an ecological disaster of Biblical proportions if we were to destroy the off-shore eschuaries to 'mine' it), the additional reserves would only add less than 15 years before extinction at the rate we are burning up our resources. And consider that the 3rd wold citizens are wanting to share in our 'good life' by also obtaining our source of energy.

Nuclear power is not the answer as long as there is not a reliable, safe and economic way to convert radioactive byproducts into stable, harmless isotopes. Neutron radiation doesn't work. There is no such thing as a 'safe burial'. The geology is unstable and pourous every where. Leakage cannot be prevented and neither can companies nor government agencies be trusted to enforce 'safe' containment protocols even if such protocols existed. The Karen Silkwood story says it all.

We have a safe, clean burning fusion reactor right over our heads! I expect to see some form of a Solar powered, recycled Hydrogen economy develop, where Hydogen is geneated by electrolysis of brackish water, bottled or piped out and the Oxygen bottled or released. The only byproducts of combustion of Hydrogen is water, if fuel cells are used or if combustion engines use injected water to cool flame fronts and improve efficiencies.

http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN06-21-96/barstow.html
http://www.eren.doe.gov/csp/csp_tech.html

The only thing preventing it now is the fact that current energy companies haven't found a way to meter sunlight yet, except in the Dominican Republic, by renting 50 watt collectors at $10/month. After a few more shortage scares I hope we will begin a "Manhattan Project" to develop economical usages of Megawattage solar generation and make the information public knowledge so peoples don't have to fight over resources or "intellectual property".

The next twenty years are going to be very interesting, if not challanging.
JLK