SUNDAY

Energy is 2 parts: 1, electricity (power)/heating; and 2, transportation. The government has invested lately, through the stimulus and other funding, into new power technologies and infrastructure enough for now to help get the industry booted. Continued spending in R&D is now the priority to get those new techs competitive with coal and NG. We have enough electricity and heating. And the cost is still low. And we can certainly get more efficient. The problem is still GHG emissions. Mostly with coal use. Both for public health/environmental damage and for longer term global warming/climate change. We can continue to work on the many parts of that puzzle while taking a rest and refocus on the government spending.

Our cost problem now is transportation. And it's also a national security problem. We can't be dependent on other countries for our energy. We should now put our money and efforts into anything but oil for transportation. EV's. Alternate fuels. And NG, which, obviously, crosses over to heating and some power gen, though the news of recent years is we've been able to access new gas from shale deposits, albeit with pollution issues that have to be resolved. This all assumes, of course, that we are not sitting on vast deposits of untapped oil in the US, which is a popular myth or reality. But, nevertheless, oil gives off too much GHGs for our own good.

We are getting beyond using food crops for fuel. As we should. We need to put more effort and money into these next biofuel generations and stop supporting food fuels. And there's algae. We need to speed up that development and deployment. And, yes, NG should be supported in fleet situations - trains, trucks, ships - where it's economic sense. And then why can't we drive more efficient vehicles? Most of us are just hauling ourselves around. We don't need 5 other seats or trunks all the time. Or steel. There is carbon composite tech. And, if turning wheels can produce electricity, why don't we just put generators on our wheels to power el motors? Or if we have a large inflow of wind into the front ends of our cars, why can't we put small wind turbines in there to keep batteries charged for the el motors? You know, I think enough of us are tired enough of the oil industry and auto industry partnership making all the calls. Look where they have us.

I'm sure we'll see smarter, more efficient energy technologies. But we have to get ourselves there.