We Need a "Manhattan Project" for Energy Indepencence

I have been considering the blood and red ink we are hemmorhaging in our quest for oil, and I wonder how much ground we could have covered in an effort to become independent of foreign oil if we had dedicated our resources in that direction instead of a misguided, probably personal, and most likely illegal, energy war?

It is a stone-cold fact that the dead dinosaurs are dwindling, and will soon be gone. No one denies this anymore. So why are we dying for the stuff instead of moving on? Intensive, round the clock R & D needs to commence immediately. LNG and coal should be skipped over as alternatives, they are still carbon-emitting energy sources. We must move away from the carbon economy. Our national security depends on it.

What happened to the scientific and mathematically capable America that won the space race and beat Hitler to a nuclear weapon? (Okay, German Jewish scientists who came to America fleeing Hitler gave us the first nuke, but we were fertile scientific ground then, that is why they came here.) We need that kind of scientific endeavor again, and this time it is every bit as important as it was from the 40's through the 60's. This time we need to apply our nascent scientific talents to the development of alternative energy.

A hundred years ago, we developed the wrong technology, but we didn't really have any way of knowing at the time just how wrong we were. The
internal combustion engine has been the largest scale experiment in ecology ever undertaken. The results of the data are only now being interpretted, and they are frightening, to say the least. And spinning and denying don't change the facts. Just because the people doing the denial dance will be dead when the shit hits the fan, does not mean that it ain't gonna happen! It is undeniable that we are changing the planet. The ice caps are shrinking, the ozone layer is being depleated, species are exhibiting strange and seemingly random mutations, and the climate is most definitely warming. Anyone who has ever lived on the west coast during an El Nino year knows a couple of degrees in temperature can make a huge difference in climate expression.

President Carter was on the right track, but we didn't want to hear it. He had the common sense to turn down the thermostat, put on a sweater, and install solar panels on the White House for hot water. Reagan had them removed with great fanfare and a snort of derision immediately upon taking office.

Ronald Reagan also let the Carter tax credits, up to $10,000 per year (I believe) for installing the equipment to harness solar and/or wind power, expire. Big energy had always opposed such tax credits, even though only a few dedicated folks who curbed consumption and would have probably installed alternative power generators anyway took advantage of them. These tax credits need to be revisited, and then reinstated, immediately.

We need to offer full-ride scholarships to state universities for students persuing degrees in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. If you are willing to study science and do five years of research into alternative energy production, we are willing to educate you. Individual states already do this for doctors, nurses, and teachers. The military will pay over a hundred grand to train a doctor, in exchange for a mere five years of service, during which the doctor gets officer pay, which does not suck, especially when the 20g's per year that was paid for school are factored in. We need classify development of alternative energy a priority of national security, and apply these same recruiting practices to the development of independent energy sources.

We need to offer patents and rewards to all those tinkerers out there who hook up a light-bulb to a stream and have electric light at a campsight. We need teams of researchers working on multiple alternative technologies. The next time we develop a technology, we need to be certain that we are on the right track. Nuclear, hydrogen, wind, solar, geothermal, they all need to be considered, researched, and developed. We need to immediately start the transition to a non-carbon economy.

We need a charismatic leader who will speak truth to power, who will stand up and stand firm. We need a litmus test in the next president: There can be no connection to the energy industry, especially oil, ever, at any point in the candidates family history, not even a grandpa who was a wildcatter one summer during the depression. Hell, I would eliminate anyone who pumped gas in high school, except we need a president who has actually had a real job at some point in his or her life...

For any part of my grand scheme to work, we have to take a page from the Republican playbook. The Republicans actually lifted this tactic from my 89-year-old Grandmother who was once a big-shot in her county Democratic machine, although they did not know it. My Grandmother believed then and beleives now that the most important ballot an individual can cast is a vote for the local school board. We need to take her admonition to heart and focus on the local schoolboard elections.

Local elections are the most important, according to my still active and revered Grandmother, because they have the most immediate impact on the lives of the citizens who vote for them. Besides, she used to snort, the reason they sent a lot of those elected officials to Washington in the first place was to get them the hell out of Missouri. She feels this emotion especially strongly in the cases of Jim talent, Kit Bond, and Sam Graves. She has defeated breast cancer twice, claiming that she flat-out refuses to die with her entire Missouri delegation and the presidency all in Republican control, even if it does send three fairly odious and arrogant jackasses to another time zone to live in a swamp. (Instead of killing her, Matt Blunt has turned back her clock at least ten years.)

About 25 years ago, the neocons started to sneak in, and they began to implement their agenda from the ground up, rather than from the top down. Infiltrate the foundation in order to undermine. Brilliant! While we weren't paying attention, they chopped us off at the knees. They de-emphasized evolution, they eviscerated science standards, relaxed the math and science requirements for graduation from high school...Some accredited colleges and universities now actually issue degrees without a course in mathematics equivalent to college algebra, pre-calculus, or statistics.

The consequences of this have immediate effects on peoples lives. Let me give you an example from my professional life: I personally know many Registered Nurses, who are responsible for the administration of I.V. drugs that can easily cross the line from therapeutic to fatal with slight dosage variations, who are mathematically incapable of titrating a dose to correspond with a patients body weight. Help with this task is not a request I ever snapped at anyone for making of me, the stakes are too high to tell someone to just figure it out themselves. If you have ever been a patient, or love anyone who has ever been a patient, this should be a sobering realization. I have worked in a lot of hospitals in a lot of different places over the last 20 years, and in every US hospital in which I have worked, I knew of at least one nurse on every shift who lacked the ability to adequately perform this task safely and accurately. This is unacceptable, and it is inexcusable. (Fortunateley, laboratory professionals, who are responsible for taking the guesswork out of the doctors job, are still required to take math courses through calculus, and a boatload of upper division sciences, and carry a minimum GPA of 2.5 to satisfy the requirements of most Medical Technologist professional training programs. If this ever changes, I will be raising hell louder than usual.)

But snapping back from reality, so to speak, I want to return to the issue of schoolboards. We are fiddling as Rome burns. Our students are being outpaced by children from other countries who aren't spoiled, overweight couch-potatos who don't want to do anything that is difficult. Not all American kids are, but too many fit this discription.

I never had to drill this into my childrens heads, they just got it automatically, somehow...I am justifiably proud of my children. But yes, we worked very hard to get the results we got. They didn't just happen.

I'm not pretending to be a paragon of maternal virtue and excellence. I had the same things drilled into my head by my parents as I stressed with my children. Namely, school is important, and as long as you are under 25 and doing 3.0 or above work, it is your job. Every semester, take a math and a hard science and work the rest of your courses around that, but math and science will never fail you. If I'm wrong, well, it's my dime. (But math and science still won't fail you.)

I don't have all the "how's", but I am pretty sure of a lot of the "what's" that we as a nation need to address. Freedom from oil is a national security matter, and we need to wake the hell up and realize this fact. We are in a knifefight, and this is when most people with a sense of self preservation go get a gun. Time to lock and load, so to speak.