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We have heard about CO2 goals at Copenhagen, EPA fuel economy mandates, etc.

Some of that is a necessary evil, but what about more carrot with that stick?

Provide more incentives for alt energy - make it hard to turn down - make it like offshore drilling.

If you can get companies to WANT to do green energy, it's a lot better than MAKING them go green.

This is for those who thought I was a socialist. :D

Chuck,
If you were king...

How would you do it? - Dale

Well, first we need a psychology major...or a car salesman. Someone with the ability to persuade others to make decisions they never thought they'd make.

We'd need to get on the good side of very important personnel in the industry. Better yet, do some sort of survey (short, like 3 questions, people don't like spending any more time doing those things) asking what these people would like in their daily life that they don't already have (Target SUV owners who could care less about fuel economy)

Find a way to incorporate it into a green movement, something you can only have by going green, or something that becomes more easily available because of green.

Now we have a starting point.

Incentives for the elusive alterative energy will have to be cheaper than our other forms of subsidized energy. We can not keep throwing money at issues trying to make one seem like the best deal. This makes them all more expensive and only postpones us from actually finding solutions. What is the true cost of a gallon of ethanol? Who the heck could ever figure out due to all the subsidies and crap that the industries get! Not just the farming or distilling but oil, gas, wind, solar… They all figure into the cost of a gallon of corn ethanol. Even that elusive lobbyist money needs to come from somewhere and you can be sure each one of us contributes a few dollars for every cause, support it or not.

If I had a great answer to what to do to solve all this… Well, no one would listen to me because I am just a woodchuck (similar to a hick, hillbilly, ridge-runner…). What we do need to try is letting the market fix prices. If ethanol is really $20.00 a gallon to produce then so be it. If it is $.50 great but don’t artificially fix a price. This might mean crude oil prices rise and therefore gas rises well then that’s just the way it is. If gas really should cost $15.00 a gallon then let it be so. You can be darn sure that if it started rising and promised to stay that way that alternatives would come into the market mighty fast. The money we in the US dump into subsidies and price supports would be more than enough to dump into research to find alternative energy. Not subsidized alternatives, cost effective ones in a real world economy.

The core issue may be getting business and consumer interests to act on long-term interests rather than short-term interests. So changing this is contrary to our business culture, which has the inertia of a steamroller. Eventually the short-term interest will be green, but by then, you know, human suffering will be acutely more extensive than usual, and some argue the environmental impact will irreversible.

I mean, we rewarded banks that hyper-fixated on short-term interests over the long-term with bailouts, so "big, bad guberment" isn't exactly setting a good example.