Just my opinion, which isn't worse than anyone else's on this forum, Mr. Sarcastic. Fortunately we have a President who appears to share this opinion.

Mr Sarcastic? I LIKE IT! Thanks!

Well, who appointed Mr Obama as ... etc.?

The public, who wanted a different brand of BS from the previous eight years.

They've certainly got what they wished for. Mo' betta BS.

I started hearing about 'Peak Oil' about five years ago. Having been in the employ of the evil oil companies for the last whole bunch of years a few of my friends asked me about it.

I told them it was just a lot of scare talk. I have seen far more secret info on this subject than anyone should be allowed to and I could point out to them that the US was sitting on lots of NG and oil. It just cost money to get it out of the ground.

The way this works in the real world is: The US starts to produce more oil. OPEC sees this and drops their price. Oil companies can buy from US producers or from OPEC because they are just buying raw materials. They buy from the low cost provider, and that is almost always OPEC.

But with the cost of everything going up even OPEC nations have reached the point where they need cash to keep their countries running. So they raised the price to their target of $85 a bbl. For a good operator a well can be drilled and start producing for less than this, so that leaves room for a US operator to enter the market and make a profit.

So they started drilling and drilling. They also bought old 'Strippers' (well that produce less than 5 bbls. per day) and re-worked them to start producing around 12 bpd. This is like money from home since it cost so little to re-work a well.

I have been hearing for many, many years that Democrats are against new oil production and this is flat-out nonsense peddled to a gullible public. I have never noticed any relationship between who is in power and oil drilling except when Reagan was in power and the oil production business was almost wiped out in the US. This was because of market forces and nothing Reagan did, but if you are wondering which US President was the worst ever for the oil business you would not have to look much further than Reagan.

There are now more rigs at work than at anytime in the last 28 years and this can be easily proved by looking at the Baker-Hughes active rig reports. When the cost of oil goes up the amount of production goes up with it.

But alt energy starts looking better, too, when the price of oil is up because it becomes even more in line with the cost of oil. The really good thing about the alt energy industry is that if the US can become the tech leader this will create products that the entire world will want to buy from us, and since this will bring in tons of money I fail to see the upside.

The US government has put money into tech research before and some of it has paid off big. Take the telegraph, which was funded during the Civil War in order to keep in touch with California, or the Internet, which was a DARPA project before they came up with something better and turned it loose on the world.

Even G. W. Bush backed alt energy. As much as Conservative wish it were not true the fact remains that Solyndra was vetted and approved during his administration. All the Obama people did was take the OK'ed paperwork and cut the check.

No one does tech like the US. So I say let's get started.

the presidents opinion is his and his alone and should factor it his policies to a degree but he needs to look at the greater benefit to his country before placing idealism before facts. fact is, we have enough home grown "old" energy sources for our country to be self sufficient for the next few centuries at current and projected consumption rates. why reinvent the wheel, lets keep our money here in the states, develop cleaner technologies for use of existing resources along with allowing development of alternative resources in parallel. just don't start throwing crap on the wall and see what sticks. lets go full bore with controlled fusion research, lets go full bore like we did with the lunar program and let's get it done but with one twist....we need the free market to kick in and let the winner be shaken out in the process. it picks winners very very consistently. govt subsidized programs are great and wonderful and should be there for incubators but not for full scale industry flotation as we have seen worldwide with solar. pull the govt subsidies again like we did in the early 80's and the industry goes back to dormancy. it only picked back up because of govt subsidies and will crash again. it is not a sustainable mass market product. it has wonderful merits for niche applications but that's where it stops.

I would love to live in an alternative energy utopia but it is still a pipe dream for the masses. Sorry to say but we will have coal, oil, NG and the other evil energy sources for many generations to come. I hope we can utilize them in a cleaner fashion.

another point of perspective is look how far we have come in terms of cleaner evil energy. look at pics of LA and other major metro areas in the 50's through the 80's and the pollution was shocking. Go look now and the difference is amazing, even with the huge increase in population and all the evil energy driven source points. double down, triple down on emissions control and let's use what we have already.

See post #20 for a good explanation. Pooka said it better than I did.

Secondly, why not use the energy from a very big fusion reactor that's already running for our use? Third, the air may be cleaner, but you can't see or smell the increased CO2 concentrations. Clean fossil fuels are a fraud dreamed up by the people who have vested interests in continuing the fossil fuel economy.

Even though we had access to all the oil in the world (well, maybe not all, but we did own a big % of NG in Texas) we still used a lot of solar power.

There are some places where there is no electricity but there is a need for electric power. Solar works nicely when it is put together right.

The one big drawback we found to using solar was people would steal the panels. The solution was to put this high up on a pole. You could still climb up there and unbolt them, but unless you had a hand the size of a 116 hood you could never get them down. Not in one piece, anyway.

I was just reading about a fellow that built a remote farmhouse who put in nothing but solar. When he found that the power company wanted $20,000 to bring wires to his house he just went solar because it cost less up front. And now he has no power bills and never will, so he thought it all worked out for the best.

By the way.... One government/private industry hook-up that worked well in the tech sector was aircraft. The Wrights tried for years to sell a Flyer and were turned down by everyone because it really did not meet anyone's needs. The Wrights did not have the money to develop a new Flyer until the US stepped in and worked a deal with them by offering big money for an airmail service. By that time there were others building Flyers, like Curtis, and when the money was there the Aircraft was developed. But it took government incentives to do it.

And that seems to have worked out well.

Not to mention the railroads, which were given a lot of land to develop at the sides of the transcontinental lines in addition to the rights of way themselves.

what in post 20 helps your stance? his $20k off grid example is the niche market I describe as how it works well. That is not a mass market or majority type of use that is needed to keep solar afloat.

where would this big fusion reactor be located? only one I know of is being developed in France....not even online yet

One has been "on-line" for several billion years.

ah gotcha ya....well find a cost effective mass market product to harness it and get back with me. in the mean time keep dreaming and keep plugging away, I will back you or anyone 100% when they come up with a viable cost effective way to harness the sun in comparison to what is already in use and created through millennia by the same sun you keep touting

Prices of solar panels keep going down. They'll go down further due to economies of scale if adoption rate increases. Subsidies help increase adoption rate. How is spending on new sources of energy any worse than spending on new forms of transport (railroads, aircraft) or communication (telegraphs, Internet)? Obama actually has this right if he can pull it off.

Yeah, it's sad that the US, which used to be at the forefront of progress is now full of anti-change obstructionists and anti-science religious zealots.

subsidies on solar have been on and off from the 70's.....they can only exist in a subsidy environment.....it has been proven when the subsidy backing is pulled they can NOT sustain the solar sector on its own.

twist it around, bring in other anecdotes or whatever it simply does not add up unless another sector is punished, held back or otherwise leaned on, solar will not be viable for the vast majority of consumers............................at its current rate of efficiency and engineering specs

again keep up the dream and the fight and it may one day push forward to a viable solution but with subsidies for current technology it introduces resting on their laurels and stifles innovation

once again let the free market forces shape the industry if there is any solar industry to be shaped....right now it's still pie in the sky adaptation and technology

Can't survive on its own YET. Keep in mind that what is now known as the Internet was heaving subsidized from the late 50s till the 90s. Give solar tech another 10 years of subsidy and it has a chance of being weaned from subsidies.

As far as subsidies, if they're done right (not the full, unlimited cost of a system, but either a % of cost, or a fixed figure), then there will be incentive to reduce costs in the industry.

As far as the idea of a "free market", the government has manipulated markets since the railroad subsidies of the 1800s, if not earlier. What's one more manipulation?