Cheap Energy

Just as the 55mph speed limit during the Carter administration failed to fix our dependence on hostile foreign oil, or daylight savings fails miserably today -- the very problem of oil depletion presents an opportunity.

“We are being compelled to become energy misers, fretting over every little bit that goes to waste. Just as saving on the pennies won't buy us a marvellous new house, so energy scavenging is hardly the answer to the impending dual crisis posed by a shortage of fossil fuels and the deleterious environmental effects of those we're burning now.” Phill Ball in Nature Materials 9, 290, March 24, 2010

Now is the time for innovative, disruptive, new enterprise to displace the fossils of the Industrial Era with more efficient energy sources. Our strategy should focus on energy sources so efficient as to produce a cheap exploitable economic resource available to all. Cheap sustainable energy would not only replace inefficient fossil fuel but solve the pollution problem and more importantly the security risk associated with our dependence on foreign oil. Clean coal is an oxymoron and the ultimate in inefficiency, especially taking into account the human and environmental cost of mining.

The economic opportunity goes far beyond new US jobs in an exploding new industry. The presence of a cheap exploitable resource drives all the rest of the economy. Just as cheap oil did initially in the 20s or cheap land before that. Furthermore, cheap energy for heating and air conditioning not only improves the well being and productivity of our population, our human resource, but it also releases discretionary income into the market through increasing money flow and investment.

The conservative choice is to let obsolete big industrial age business fail, allowing their replacement with better more efficient solutions.