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But it's certainly not going to fix the energy issues on its own.
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This seems to me like the biggest fallacy of most new energy proposals; everybody is looking for the silver bullet. It doesn't exist. There is no single solution to the problem, but there are several incremental and varying steps that will all contribute to a more sustainable policy:
1) increased efficiency of consumption, including home appliances and vehicles.
2) altered habits that rely on less use of energy, such as mass transit use and carpooling
3) an increased efficiency in the crude-to-unleaded production line, so that US gas prices don't swing by 50 cents when a single refinery goes down
4) increasing reliance on sustainable energy sources. No, there's not going to be a single new energy source that replaces oil, but broad incremental shifts to new sources will make a huge impact on demand.
5) some sort of middle-ground on new source exploration vs. environmental impact. Nobody wants to turn the Arctic circle into a teeming mass of bubbling crude, but we need to recognize that there are untapped energy resources that will take 10-20 years to go from discovery to market, and that our need for such resources will only increase in urgency. Is there no room for middle ground? Maybe the environmental groups can actually work with the energy groups to develop a plan of exploration that has minimal impact.
It seems to me that various interest groups back single points of this list, and decry any other move because it's not their particular solution. Increase efficiency in vehicles is bad because it's not pushing people to new sources? that's absurd. Sustainable energy sources are bad because they're not prevelant enough to shoulder the burden of oil? that's absurd too.
We need a broad range of solutions, and we need to embrace them all. There is no one solution.