MrPerson wrote:You know I never really realized, but We recently watched a brief documentary in one of my courses that had a little compilation about all the times politicians promised to look into replacing coal or gas powered vehicles with more energy efficient "Green" equipment. Being a 90s kid, I only noticed seeing those topics covered in 2008's election and I assumed it was due to the ridiculous gas prices. I never really knew that those same "promises" were being made since the late 60s early 70s. Wonder if anyone will ever actually do anything about it.
Wait... you're saying that politicians don't always deliver on the promises they make to get elected?
On the "green" thing: there seems to be an assumption there that interfering with the energy marketplace is something a government should be doing. That assumption might not be wrong, but it ought at least to be exposed and questioned.
Your point on learning more about the history of energy prices is a good one. Dependence on OPEC oil in the early '70s led to shortages and
actual (for the U.S.) high prices. I personally sat in gas lines, where even after rationing you could only buy gas on even- or odd-numbered days depending on the last number of your license plate. This is far worse than anything today's drivers encounter.
But it wasn't government intervention that solved the problem and kept energy prices low for four decades: it was private industry, whose legally-protected ingenuity in a free market improved oil deposit detection technology and invented fracking. Whatever one may think of the safety of fracking near aquifers, it's undeniable that this privately-invented technology has done far more to deliver relatively very inexpensive energy to U.S. citizens than any government-imposed price controls or Solyndra-style boondoggles to reward political campaign contributors.
I personally think there may be an appropriate role for a federal government to play in funding basic research across multiple technology domains. But that has to be transparent, and monitored, to prevent its being corrupted into short-sighted playing of favorites (at taxpayer expense) with individual businesses, whether they're Solyndra or Carrier.
And there is zero adequate substitute for reading enough history to learn to be responsibly skeptical of politicians claiming they will "fix" anything that private citizens can and should work together to fix for themselves. So a big
on that.