This is an example of the kind of magical thinking some alternative energy proponents engage in. If only we’d spent more money, we wouldn’t have these problems, because we’d have cheap, clean, renewable energy!
Except that you can’t identify the engineering path to this magical energy, you can’t describe where the money should have been spent that would have yielded the result you assume we could have had. It’s all fantasy.
You also ignore the fact that billions WERE spent. Many billions. How many more were required to attain this certainty of green energy? Do you have a ballpark figure?
The fact is, some engineering problems are really, really hard. There are physical limits that are hard or impossible to get around. Fossil fuels have extremely high energy density. We just haven’t figured out how to do any better. Nuclear power has come closest in terms of cost-benefit, but even there we have serious difficulties.
So you don’t get to wave your arms and say, “If you’d listened to us, this wouldn’t have happened!” In fact, if Japan had listened to you it’s entirely possible that their economic growth would have have been a percentage point or two lower for the last forty years due to higher cost of energy and/or lack of availability of power for industry, and compounded over 40 year might mean the standard of living in Japan could be half or a quarter of what it is today. With a commensurate reduction in ability to be able to handle a disaster like this. If Japan had been hit with this tsunami but had an economy closer to Haiti’s than to the U.S., the loss of life could have been a hundred times greater.
Nuclear fusion got the kind of money you’re talking about, straight from the government. Nothing has come of it. Companies like GE, Siemens, and various others have dumped billions of dollars into alternative energy research. Private industry spends several billion dollars per year on alternative energy research and development.
Look, everyone knows that an honest-to-god cheap replacement for fossil fuel is the holy grail. Large amounts of money go into finding that energy. We just haven’t figured out how to do it. The people choosing to invest money or not have looked at the potential - they plan out a decade or two in advance. They spent money when it looks like it might have a positive return, and they don’t if it doesn’t. For you to state that more investment would have solved the problem is simply an ignorant statement. You don’t know. You’re taking a stab in the dark with other people’s money.
Germany has been pumping huge subsidies into the solar power industry. I drove through there last year and was amazed at how many solar panels I saw on houses and small businesses. But it hasn’t really helped. Talking to Germans with the panels, it seems like the benefits were over-sold, and the subsidies used to encourage them has caused a lot of bad decisions to be made.
Spain’s experience in building a subsidized solar industry was not good. They pumped huge money into their solar companies, then they went broke, the companies went under and flooded the market with inventory, hurting other solar firms. In the end, not much has changed.
It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that if we’d have spent the billions more on alternative energy that you say would have prevented all this, we’d simply be billions of dollars poorer.
