I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of the crap. I’ll be happy to listen to honest debate about real issues, but the truth is that without a stimulus package there is no end in sight for this recession. I might be upset about how much this is going to cost, but I do recognize what the cost in human suffering would be if we sat on our hands and did nothing.

Of course, that’s not really what the Republicans want. That would be madness. It might cost some of them their cushy jobs and there might be a decline in support from their rich buddies. No, what the Republicans really want is to protect their own special interests from the axe that Obama is wielding in order to find the money to fix the problems he’s inherited without digging us so deep in the whole we’d never get out. So the Republicans will scream about spending on volcano monitoring equipment, about replacing federal vehicles that guzzle gas with hybrids and electrics, and about any other line item that they can spin into some kind of look-at-what-they’re-wasting-money-on-now!

Let’s talk about waste. How about sitting on our hands for thirty years after we were shown by the first Oil Crisis, just how vulnerable we were because of our dependence on oil? For all those years, the oil companies have drained money out of our pockets and put it into the pockets of middle-east high-rollers, some of whom like to finance terrorists. The money that paid for the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 came from the U.S., in payments for oil. Take a moment and think about what this country might look like if all that money hadn’t been carried off by the super-tanker load. We would have had money for road work, for health care, for improving the education of our children. We would all be better paid.

If we hadn’t paid for that oil. If we had refused to stay addicted and developed alternative energies, we would still have all that money, and we might not now be facing the climate change crisis that looms over us like a dark and dangerous storm that has yet to break.

Why didn’t we make changes? Because most of the politicians who’ve been in power over the last 30 years have owed allegience to Big Oil. The Bush family got their money from oil. Oil money helped finance Regean’s campaign and that of McCain. About the time it looked like Clinton might have gotten to work on the problem, Republicans suckered him into lying to Congress by questioning him about his affair with an intern. (You should keep in mind, that up until Clinton was questioned, he’d broken no law. He’d just been a cheating pig, which isn’t illegal in this country.) The Republican party managed to keep our former President busy with legal problems, so he wasn’t able to do his job.

That happens too much on both sides of the aisle, but lately, the Republicans seem to have made obstruction and obscufation a science. Even now, they are doing their best to slow the current administration. I dont’ think they have real problems with what Obama is doing. They all know that if they were in his place, they’d be forced to do the same things, but none of them have the guts to admit it. So, instead, they oppose him, for no reason other than he’s not Republican.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it often. If our politicians can’t begin to place the importance of good government before their own party affiliation, then we will fail as a nation. We will show the whole world what can happen when a democracy devolves into a mindless power struggle. The real shame of it is, we are needed. The U.S. needs to lead the way out of the Climate Change mess. If we don’t, it won’t just be our ideals that are lost, it might be our entire civilization, if not our species and most of the other species on the planet.

I used to think the Climate Change guys were exagerating, so I started reading the actual reports. I learned as much of the science as I could, and tried to determine who was giving me the straightest information. What scares me is that I don’t think the scientists have been exagerating. I think most of them are understating things. Scientists, unlike politicians, live or die based on what they say. The can’t go back and spin the scientific papers they author.

If we let things get completely out of hand and the Ice in Antarctica melts, our species may never see the Earth like it is now ever again. There is enough ice in Antarctica and Greenland to raise the seas at least thirty feet. That is high enough to flood over ninety percent of the populated world. People like to live near the ocean, and most of them do. Even though 30′ might not sound like that much, that would be enough to submerge most of Florida, all of the Florida Keys, most barrier islands, and all the pacific coral atolls. All those people would have to move inland, and they wouldn’t have any resources to bring with them. Couple that with a world population that is still growing and it’s a pretty bad picture.

So, here’s what I’d like. I would like the Republican constituents to have a chat with their representatives about honesty. I believe a healthy opposition party is a vital part of our system of government. That means we need a party that can argue based on the merit of it’s ideas, not on how much it can spin piddling nits into “issues.”

Barak Obama has already performed two invaluable services for our country. By getting elected, he’s helped us take another giant step forward, away from our racist past and into a more accepting future; and he’s set a new standard for honesty and integrity in government. Let’s see if the rest of our politicians can rise to the challenge of practicing politics like a grown up.

Look at the mess that kind of thinking has gotten us into. Our economy is trashed, as is our reputation around the world, several thousand of our children were sent to die in Iraq on the basis of a lie, and we are facing a world wide environmental crisis.

To those of you who have something to sell to the American people, I’d suggest trying a little honesty. It would be refreshing. Even better, it might work. You might find that people are willing to pay a little bit more for products that are peddled using accurate information instead of ludicrous stories and obvious pandering.

On the other side of this equation, I strongly suspect that people are going to become quite vengeful towards those that they feel put them in this position. They are going to wonder why the guy who sold all those sub-prime mortgages has a nice house while they are being foreclosed on. They’ll wonder why the CEOs and CFOs of all these corporations are getting paid bonuses when the end result of the work they did is the collapse of their companies and the world economy.

It used to be that honesty was taken for granted. Maybe we need to work on cleaning up our act and making it possible to live that way once more. It won’t solve all our problems, but perhaps it will make the ones that we have a little easier to face.

I don’t understand exactly what has happened to collapse our economy, but there are some things that have been going on for a long time that I believe played a role. If they aren’t fixed, I think we’ll either fail to recover, or we’ll go on to have another enormous collapse at some future date that dwarfs this one. I’ll just list them here. See if any make sense to you.

• Oil – This is one where most people agree. When you import half the raw material you need to burn to generate the energy you need, you are draining your country dry. That’s especially true when you are giving the money to people who fund criminals who attack our citizens. That oil wealth itself has created the terrorism problem by propping up bad governments that deny their citizens the basic freedoms we enjoy. Without money for weapons, most of those regimes would have fallen, to be replaced – one can hope – by more representational governments. If the money had been going into a democratic country, it would have created jobs and increased the size of the middle class, which would have generated demand for products we produce. Instead, most of that money has gone into the hands of individuals who are already wealthy where it does very little for anyone.
• Playing Favorites – If you want capitalism and free markets to work, everyone has to have an equal chance. All businesses need to have equal access to markets, to financing, and to government services. But that’s not how it works in the U.S. Here, we favor the largest businesses over all others. This is foolish, because large businesses do NOT create lots of new jobs. They aren’t particularly innovative. What they do best, is sue other businesses, try to form monopolies, jack up prices, and worry more about quarterly profits than if the consumer actually likes their product.On the other hand, small and medium-sized businesses employ half the people in this country and are always the fastest to enter new markets, generate new technologies, and create innovations.Hewlett-Packard laughed off Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack, when they presented their idea for a personal computer to the company. It wasn’t IBM, or Digital, or any of the other giant computer companies that invented one of the most important new industries on the planet.

  One of the worst problems with huge companies like Ford, GM, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac, is that they are ‘too large to fail.’ The economic consequences of allowing any of these huge companies to fail are dire. Millions of people get laid off in a short period, causing a shockwave that travels through the economy like a wrecking ball.

  The CEOs and Presidents of these huge companies demand enormous power and extravagant salaries way beyond the actual worth of the individual to the business. As these companies get larger and gobble up other companies, the number of people making critical decisions in that industry gets smaller and smaller.

  The common argument for huge companies is that there is no other way. That some jobs are too big to be done by smaller companies. That’s a load of caca. There is no reason you can’t have a group of companies work together on big jobs. There will be inefficiencies, but those same inefficiencies might also make it harder for a single person to bankrupt the entire enterprise.

  If we really want to have a healthy capitalistic free-market economy, we need to stop giving any assistance to companies once they reach a certain size. Our government policies need to be focused on improving the health of the small and medium-sized businesses. Big companies should give way to hosts of smaller competitors all out to do a better job than the other guy. When one of them fails, a much smaller number of people will be out-of-work, and they should be able to find employment among their former competitors, or even start up their own business.

  Like gigantic stars warp space, huge companies warp the economy around themselves.

• Regulations – Regulations aren’t bad. If an industry is not constantly whining and bitching about how the regulations are keeping it from achieving maximum profitability, then you need more regulations. Regulations keep an industry healthy. Regulators try to make sure that the players in their industry follow the rules. As we have seen, you can not depend on businesses to act in their own best interest when it looks like there’s a quick profit to be made. Some of the brightest business people in our country were involved in these sub-prime mortgages. They weren’t stupid people, and most of them weren’t evil, but they fell victim to peer pressure and greed, just like all of us can.To me, the idea that people will act in their own rational self-interest is one of the biggest pipe-dreams anyone has ever come up with, and it is central to Adam Smith’s economic ideas and the principles of conservative thinking. If people were able to be rational, why do people smoke cigarettes? Why do so many people gamble? It’s because we are not rational. We need rules, and we need people to make sure we actually follow the rules.
• Education – It was World War II that pulled us out of the Great Depression. We can’t afford to wage another war like that in order to pull out of this one, so we need to understand why WWII helped and find ways to replicate that effect. It seems obvious to me that it was the incredible ramping up in industrial production capability that was needed to provide logistics for the war that saved us. But it was something else that helped keep things going afterward, and that was the GI Bill and an unprecedented number of young men going to college after the war. That’s what helped give us the prosperity of the fifties.The U.S. has been falling behind in education. We all moan and groan about it, but we never actually do anything. When proposals come up in our towns to raise taxes in order to improve public schools, the proposals are voted down. The rich in the communities don’t care, since they send their kids to private schools. The government’s moronic endorsement of charter schools, which is basically a poorly disguised way to fund religious schools with public money, drains more resources away from public schools.

  Public schools are one of the few places where all members of our society can meet and get to know each other. If all our children go to the same schools, than we really would be saying, this is a country in which we strive to give everyone an equal chance. Instead we have been racing away from that idea ever more quickly.

  We need to re-embrace the commitment to public education. Voucher programs primarily help the wealthy, who are doing just fine already, which is why we call them wealthy. We need to be doing whatever is needed to make sure that our schools are second to none.

  Improving our schools does NOT mean teaching by rote or “going back to basics” or any other such rubbish. It does not mean putting every kid in the country through batteries of meaningless standardized tests. We need to develop teaching methods using science. We need to harness the power of our new computing and presentation technologies to make it possible to tailor the education of every student in America to his or her needs

  Our children are the ones who the economy will depend on in the future, when we are all retired. It will be the energy, creativity, and willingness to work of our children that determines what our own final years will be like. So call it rational self-interest to make sure that our kids are given the best possible education.

  It used to be that your educational progress was measured primarily by your grades. The assumption was that your teachers had the most comprehensive knowledge of you as an individual and that they could see both problems and talents that tests would miss. We need to put the evaluation of the students back on the teachers, where it belongs, and try to give the teachers better tools for evaluating the student.

• Population - Here’s one no one will talk about. There are too many people. The conservatives won’t talk about it because then they might have to talk about birth control, which gives them hives. I don’t know why the rest of us avoid it. Maybe because it’s felt like open season on liberals in the U.S. for the past eight years. Still, that’s a big part of the problem. We need to be teaching effective birth control here in the U.S. and everywhere else in the world. Someone has got to convince the Catholic Church and the Mormons that encouraging poor people to have as many children as possible is no longer a good idea and is mostly good at keeping poor people poor.

  One of the big upticks in the world economy happened back in the middle-ages about the time of the plague. Over about a hundred years, half the population was killed. Farms and whole towns were left empty, and wound up being reclaimed by the forest. All of a sudden, there were a lot fewer people, but most of the industrial capacity, in the form of tools and buildings was still intact. Around the same time, the horse collar came into widespread use, allowing an individual to farm more land than he needed for his family. That meant extra crops that could be sold in town. And that’s how we got the middle-class.

  I’m not advocating a plague. But I am pointing out that our world might be a lot better if we all had fewer children. Not only would it mean there were more resources per capita, it would also mean that we’d have less of an impact on our environment.

  Water and oil are going to become very scarce in the future, and if we don’t take any measures to control population growth, it will be wars that do it for us.

• Environment - Global warming isn’t some made-up thing to scare rich folks, it’s real. We’re already seeing the effects in longer growing seasons, stronger storms, and rising seas. While the effects might seem gradual to you and I, they are terrifyingly fast to those who study the climate. The world has had high CO2 levels before, as high as 1000 parts per million (ppm). So what’s the big deal about 400ppm or 500ppm? The big deal is that while levels have risen in the past, right now they are rising at a rate a thousand times greater than anything in the historical record. During past times of rapid growth in CO2 there were massive extinctions, which is the same thing we are seeing now. In fact, almost a quarter of all mammal species are now threatened in some way by climate change, poaching, environment destruction or some other problem we’ve caused.

  Why should you care if some animals go extinct? Because we don’t know how our ecology works. One of the animals that is suddenly having serious problems is the honey bee. Without the honey bee, it will be difficult to raise many crops like citrus, nuts, and dozens of others. A substantial fraction of our food supply might go away. No one had even though about that kind of possibility until recently, when bee colonies all over the U.S. started disappearing.

  Heard any good frogs lately? I hope so, because all amphibians seem to be in danger, too. That’s a whole class of animals. It’s possible that your grand kids children might not be able to go out and catch frogs and toads on those warm summer nights, like you used to.

  At some point, a key species will be eliminated and it will cause a chain reaction that will kill off entire ecological communities. Since we have no idea how to recover a lost species, that could lead to scenarios where most of the life on Earth perishes.

  Climate change isn’t just about things getting warmer. When the climate changes the way it has been, there are incredibly complex interactions, which will produce unpredictable consequences.

  We need to reinvigorate our basic sciences and encourage the study of the climate and the changes that are happening. During the last eight years, most of the researchers at the EPA have reported some kind of censorship. That has to stop. Without good information, we cannot possibly make the right decisions in dealing with the environmental problems that we’ve caused.

  It might seem like we have to put the environment on the back burner in order to deal with the economic issues, but if we do so, will there be an environment to save later?

  On the other hand, if we develop the technologies needed by the entire world to deal with these issues, we’ll have a new industry that will generate new jobs and new wealth.

Normally, I would oppose a bail out, just as the Republicans are doing. I don’t like the idea of bailing out the automakers. It’s become a bad habit. The leadership of the American automobile industry seems to be made up of people who can’t see past the next quarter and who are convinced that lobbying Congress is more important than making good cars. Frankly, we deserve a lot better than we’ve been getting from that group.

The writing has been on the wall since the 1970′s. We need alternatives to gas-guzzling cars. Instead of giving us those alternatives, the auto industry has squandered every opportunity we’ve given it. When the Japanese voluntarily restricted imports so that the U.S. automakers could catch up, the U.S. automakers jacked up prices, paid out bonuses, and stubbornly refused to improve quality until the voluntary restrictions ended and Detroit was forced to compete again. Instead of developing more efficient engines, the Big-3 have focused on pushing SUVs down the throat of every consumer. SUVs are great. Since they are classified as light trucks, they don’t have to meet the same pollution or efficiency standards as cars. That means they can be made bigger and heavier. SUV designers seem determined to force everyone into SUVs by making it clear that if there’s a collision between a SUV and an ordinary automobile, the SUV is gonna win.

The automakers tell us that we want SUVs. I’m sure some of us do. But I kind of think that the automakers could have sold us all golf carts with the kind of advertising budgets they’ve used to push SUVs on us. Does anyone really need a Hummer? Really?

If you don’t believe me, think about smoking. When I was a kid, smoking was so wide-spread, you really couldn’t get away from it. Marketing changed that. The U.S. government and organizations like the Red Cross, American Lung Association, spend tons of money alerting us to the dangers of smoking. They made us realize that if we smoke, it will – more than likely – kill us or someone we love. And look what happened, people actually stopped smoking! They even passed laws to protect people from secondary cigarette smoke! Advertising went up against one of the most addictive substances we’ve discovered, and advertising won. I suspect that proper advertising could help U.S. citizens understand that what they really want, is a car that helps secure the future for their kid, as well as keeping the kid safe right now.

So, you can see, I think it would be poetically correct just if the Big 3 went bankrupt — except we can’t afford for that to happen right now. If these companies go under, millions will lose their jobs, and I know what what it’s like to be unemployed and unable to meet my responsibilities. The auto workers be forced to take jobs paying a tiny fraction of their current wages. Of course, this may be a goal of at least some of the Republican leadership.

Now, I don’t think these guys are evil. Well, not all of them, some are pretty scary. Some conservative economists believe that the U.S. needs to adjust salaries downwards in order to be competitive in the global economy. They fear that if we don’t do so, we’ll face even greater problems in the future. They may even be right, but right now, we can’t take another hit and if the American economy goes into a great depression, it will drag the whole world with it. Then it won’t just be Al Quida criminals that hate us, it will be everyone in the world who blames us for their personal losses.

I believe there are also elements in the GOP that sincerely want the economy to tank. They feel that they can profit in the aftermath, both politically — by putting the blame on Obama — and economically — through their personal investments. I don’t see any of these conservative pundits putting their own livelihood on the line in order to help out. It’s easy to tell everyone that they just have to tighten their belts when you’ve got enough money that you’ll never go hungry. It’s always someone else who has to pay the price for their ideology, usually the poorest.

And, of course, the GOP is deeply embarrassed by how badly they did in this election. While I think most of them are thinking hard about what they can do to improve their party, how to get back in touch with their supporters and maybe do a better job than the had been doing. But, I suspect some want to lash out against the Obama for beating them. They want to see Obama fail, even if it means soup lines and massive unemployment.

Well, it’s time to grow up. We’ve seen what happens when we let our leadership react like a petulant teenager instead of a responsible well-educated grown-up. If you are a Republican, demand that your leadership fight for power the old-fashioned way, by finding a way to be better than the other guy.

This is no time for Democrats to gloat, either. There is a lot of very hard work ahead. We all need to pitch in and do our part. We need to all remember that our country is The United States of America, and that when we work together, no enemy can stand before us.The United States of America is going to have to lead the rest of the world by example, not by fiat, and not by threat. We need to lead them out of this recession and into a recovery that will generate jobs all around the world, and help us overcome the problems posed by our past mistakes.

Read on for more …

An interface is the way one system talks to another. Right now, patents on interfaces are used to create monopolies that really have no benefit for society. Patents are intended to reward innovation that contributes to society in some way, not just to make people rich.

How about some examples? Printer ink cartridges have patented interfaces in order to block competitors from making replacement cartridges. This allows the printer manufacturer to charge exhorbitent prices for printer ink and sell the actual printer hardware at a loss, turning it into a throw-away product that clutters our landfills. These consumer printers aren’t meant to be repaired. If something goes wrong they are thrown away. In a world that needs to rapidly reduce it’s carbon footprint, we need to rethink the idea of what should be disposable and what shouldn’t be.

How about music file formats? Apple uses patents on iTunes to exclude others from the music business, then they produce iPod players that are more expensive than competitors devices. The ipods also have batteries that can’t be replaced. When they go bad, you have to throw it away and buy a new one. Many people disposing of their ipods won’t even think about the fact that the batteries have cadmium, a dangerous pollutant. So rather than tossing the ipod into a battery recycling bin at the local Best Buy (Kudos for Best Buy on providing those.) they toss the iPod into the trash.

Microsoft, for year, blocked competitors from creating products that could compete with Word and the rest of the Office suite, by using proprietary file formats. Converting from Word to any other file format and back again has been problematic until very recently. What I find astonishing is that it has taken so long for companies and governments around the world to realize that depending on a single vendor for the software they need to conduct day to day business is incredibly foolish. I applaud Massecheusetts for paving the way towards rationality by adopting a file format which really is free and open, Open Document Format.

If we abolished all patents for interfaces, life would go on. Perhaps, instead of ripping people off for ink cartridges, the printer manufacturers might build printers that are robust and easy to repair. Instead of depending on proprietary document formats to force companies to upgrade to the latest version of their software, Microsoft might be forced to actually provide compelling new functionality.

There’s another benefit, too. If all interfaces were free to use, I suspect it would be easier to develop standards and get people to adopt them. This would reduce the cost to develop many products. We could spend less time reinventing the wheel, and more time working on that fusion power plant we need.

A world without interface and file format patents would also be one in which it would be far easier to build and maintain open source software. I’d be able to get open source drivers for my nVidia graphics card, or open source drivers for the broadcomm wireless chipset used in my laptop. That would make it a lot easier for me to use Linux full time.

We need to rethink things. It bears repeating. Over the next few decades, we’ll have to wean ourselves off of oil and other fossil fuels. We’ll have to start paying the full cost of products, including the cost of energy and the cost to clean up the environmental damage done while producing those products. We can’t continue to live like teenagers, tossing our dirty laundry on the floor and hoping Mother Nature will clean it up for us.

We can do better than we have done.

This is a problem of perspective. Some flying creatures will be killed by turbines. It’s sad, but the number of birds that fly into windows and die greatly outnumbers the birds that will be killed by wind farms. The mosquito control efforts in Florida kill far more bats than any wind farm will. And, the effects of our non-stop destruction of wildlife habitats will likely drive thousands more species of birds and bats extinct. Worst of all, our inexcusable tardiness in dealing with climate change may drive most bird species extinct, along with ourselves. (Admittedly, this is worst case, but we don’t have to change the climate much to destroy bird habitats.)  I suspect that the mercury pouring out of coal-fired power plants does more harm to the bird populations than any wind farm will.

Birds travel in flocks for protection. They have evolved this behavior, because it makes it harder for predators to kill them. Predation still occurs, but because birds flock, it’s usually the weakest that die. A few die so that the rest may live. That’s nature, red in tooth and claw.

I suspect we can find ways to minimize the bird kills at wind farms. But we can’t afford to abandon this energy alternative. We have already drastically changed the makeup of our atmosphere, and we’re already seeing the changes. Wind farms provide energy while, at the same time, taking energy directly out of the atmosphere. By doing so, they probably slow the impact of global warming. We need as many of them as we can build.

Wind farms won’t do the whole job. We also need solar power, electric cars, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, and energy from the tides. There will be costs associated with all of them, but I doubt those costs will be nearly as high as the cost of continuing to depend on fossil fuels that pollute our skies and disrupt the climate all over the world.

We’re told they are on the way. They’ll give us 100+mpg. See this article in Technology Review. We’re told that they aren’t yet competitive because of the high cost of more advanced batteries. As in this article in RewableEnergyAccess.com. But why wait five or ten years? Why not put plugs on all new hybrids? Are they really going to tell us that plugging in a current hybrid won’t work? It might not give us enough to make our entire commute, but does that mean it’s not worth doing at all?

There’s a group at the Electric Auto Association – Plug in Hybrid Electric Vehicle, or www.eaa-phev.org, where they have instructions on how to convert a Prius into a plug-enabled hybrid. (NOTE: This is something that should be undertaken only be people who are familiar with the technology.) These folks claim they can convert a hybrid for Prius for about $4000 and give it the 100+mpg (plug electricity) that is promised in five or ten years by the big auto manufacturers.

There are some downsides to making such a conversion. Right now, the conversion uses lead-acid batteries, which are heavy, adding 300lbs to the weight of the Prius. That will affect handling. The batteries will need replacing in only a couple years, since lead-acid can only handle 300-400 deep recharge cycles. Also, the lead-acid batteries don’t do so well when it’s cold outside, making this kind of conversion a better plan for someone in Florida than in Massachusetts.

There are other problems, too. It’s likely this will void your warranty.

Right now, this kind of conversion will extend your electric-only range by ten miles at a cost of about .22 – .24 cents per electric mile.

So making your own changes is expensive and not something to be undertaken by the faint-of-heart or mechanically challenged.

Here’s my question: Is there no advantage to simply being able to plug in your hybrid each night when you park it? True, it might not be a huge breakthrough, but if it gave everyone driving a hybrid a few extra miles on a tank of gas, the savings would add up. We need the savings today.

As I see it, adding a plug to a hybrid, if you don’t upgrade the battery pack, should be pretty cheap. You’re looking at the cost of the plug and cord, a step-down transformer, a rectifier, some control electronics – including a circuit that keeps you from driving away with the plug in the wall – and that’s about it. Probably less than a hundred dollars.

I could go on and on, and have, about the problems caused by our addition to oil. Briefly, they are: green-house gases contributing to global warming, our support of dictatorships in the Middle-East, over 3,000 dead and 30,000 wounded American soldiers, who knows how many Iraqi families left without a loved one, pollution that fouls our air, and an economy that is constantly rocked by the unstable politics of oil.Hydrogen isn’t a reasonable alternative, but it’s one the oil companies love, because they’d make sure they owned the distribution channel. They hate the idea of plug-in electric vehicles, PEVs, because it would eliminate the sector of the economy oil companies dominate. But, right now, we don’t have a good way to safely store hydrogen, which is a very flammable gas. That makes it difficult and expensive to transport and store. (This also insures that any conversion to hydrogen is still a long way in the future.)

Biofuels sound good, but making them from corn is barely break-even. If we go with alcohol made from corn, all we’re doing is creating a great welfare system for huge companies that farm corn. While there are some other biofuels that look intriguing, they will still have some of the problems we face with oil. We’ll have to have filling stations, which means we’ll still have a situation in which our fuel supply is controlled by mega-corporations. Finally, we’re still a long way from converting to those fuels. Electricity is available right now.

Write to your representatives. Write to car companies. Demand plug-in hybrids. If you go to a car dealer and look at a hybrid, grill the salesperson on why it doesn’t have a plug. Make sure the auto companies know that you want that option.

Now it’s possible, maybe even likely, that there are problems I’m not aware of. If so, leave a comment and let me know where I’ve goofed.