JosephThePoet's Blog

What a foolish way to pretend to promote alternative clean energy sources.  The cost of energy is sky high and some people want to up that cost under the guise that this will stimulate the switch to other energy sources.  Duh, you can’t act in a manner that threatens to cripple the economy and expect money will flow into the technologies you want.  And saying you won’t do anything until all the countries of the world agree to act together just proves you don’t want to do anything or that you are extremely naive about international politics.  Doing it ourselves and proving it works will make other countries want to do the same thing and would give us a trade advantage over them because we would already be there while they would be just starting out.

First you promote the growth of the needed new energy sources and then when they come online sufficiently well enough you warn the public in advance, for example 5 years in advance, that the taxes on the old fossil fuels will jump substantially.  This allows the people to choose to buy the newer products, like buying hydrogen fueled vehicles and signing on with wind and solar electrical generating companies to receive their energy needs, or to continue to buy the old gas guzzlers and staying with the companies that use fossil fuels to create electricity with the full knowledge of the high price consequences that will result from their staying with dirty burning fossil fuel sources.  That will then give an added boost to the already established newer clean energy producing product companies, and an additional incentive for new startup companies to emerge, which will reduce prices further and improve efficiencies as they gear up for an even greater production demand.

The main thing preventing hydrogen fueled vehicles from selling on mass to reduce their current high cost and promote us into the cleaner hydrogen economy is the fact that the majority of us cannot afford to, nor will we choose to, buy a vehicle that we cannot refuel no matter where we choose to drive it.  The politicians need to promote the installation of hydrogen refueling stations across the continent.  Once there are a reasonable number of stations throughout the country then the politicians will need to give assistance to local manufactures that want to build our hydrogen powered vehicles here and to companies and individuals who wish to be among the first to buy these new products at the beginning while the production starts ramping up and the unit costs are higher.

The politicians also need to strongly promote the building and installation of wind and solar generators across the continent.  There are other clean electrical producing technologies that should be promoted with tax incentives too.  The more electrical production we have the easier it will be to supply the hydrogen needs to move to the hydrogen economy.  Directed tax breaks to clean power source companies and their products, and the directed removal of tax breaks to fossil fuel providers, is part of the way to begin the process.

When the politicians recently spent the $160 billion on the so-called economic stimulus package I believe they said it was about 1% of the US tax base.  A country should spend some of the money they demand from their citizens on the country.  Can you imagine what would have happened if the politicians had said to the US public that they have set aside $160 billion dollars to refund 100%, or even only 75% or so, of the full purchase and installation costs of  wind and solar electrical generators upon them becoming operational?  Companies would have immediately ramped up production, and other people would have begun new companies, and they would have instantly started hiring people to do the manufacturing, selling, training, installation and servicing.  Instead of first borrowing the money and then hoping something good happens after you scatter it around foolishly, the money would have had to have been spent first and would have already acted to stimulate the US economy before any of it was refunded.  Requiring the operational installation aspect would have ensured the bulk of the money would have been spent on stimulating the economy of the US, instead of stimulating the Chinese economy by borrowing money from them so the refund rebates could then be spent to buy more Chinese manufactured products (Walmart type purchases).

The world’s governments have supported the fossil fuel economy long enough.  The problem was that electricity and combustion came online around the same time and gas power had the advantage of more quickly accessing the power and more mobility using the technology of the day.  Now that we have so much more knowledge our leaders should be acting to direct us along the intelligent path instead of continuing to promote this insanity.  Casually poisoning our water and the air we breathe is race insanity.  When we grow up as children we learn things and change our ways to accommodate our new understanding so we can progress positively through life, like learning how to walk, talk, look both ways before crossing the road, ride a bike, etc.  Why do we stop this intelligent way of progressing through life once we become adults?  It is time to take our learning and apply it to progress to a positive future for us all and, if we truly do love our children, to a positive future for all our children’s future generations as well.