Acidus wrote:

What I, and pretty much all the Liberals I know are against aren't new Nuke plants or refineries or wells. We are against the blind abandonment of reason. We are against the pityful view that if we simply would build more refineries and drill all of Alaska, somehow all our problems will somehow disappear. They won't. Our energy problems are much more severe and require a much larger solution and anything that doesn't try to address more than "oil" is a complete waste of time.

Supply has become a problem because we have done nothing to slow the demand.

Well I'm one of those damn hippy liberals that is opposed to new nuke plants, not because I expect Chernobyl 2 but because we've got no where to stick the crap that comes out of them. Given the time it takes to build new plants and the cost to stick the garbage somewhere, I don't see that as a reasonable plan of attack.

Neither is taking the oil. We're finding that lesson out the hard way in Iraq right now. So what are options?

First, the obvious ones. We've already pretty much tapped the hydro solution, at least in the form of dams, but on a smaller scale, generators driven the way mills were a hundred years ago is probably doable without crippling the environment we need intact to live on.

Second, we've ignored wind generation because the big things are considered eyesores. Well, too bad. Wind is one thing we can pretty much count on as long as there's still an atmosphere.

Third, direct solar power. There are already low tech things like solar water heaters all over. Simple things like that can decrease oil dependancy without changing quality of life, and that says nothing about potential high tech options like photo-voltaic farming.

In some areas, geothermal is doable, but that is much more difficult, to say nothing of dangerous because it means living closer to volcanoes.

Then there are weird alternatives like the turkey parts into oil thing (http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Oil-From-Turkey8jun03.htm). Piping methane from old garbage dumps into power generation. I'm sure given some time other odd things will pop up that work.

I'm sure at some point we'll end up drilling ANWAR. Frankly, I'd much rather do that when we really NEED to do it instead of doing it because it seems cheap to do. The truth is that we do virtually none of these, and grossly underfund research into other options.

RE: Atlanta may run out of gas.