Olympic Energy

So I've been watching the Olympics pretty much nonstop for the past 10 days. It's been pretty exciting what with all the world records and beach volleyball and bad judging in the gymnastics. But more importantly, it got me thinking about energy, all that energy the athletes are consuming and expending. Think of how wasteful it is. Not to mention all that fuel to fly them to Beijing. The world has gone crazy. Which brings me to the subject of today's post, the "energy crisis."

Let's start with a very basic question that has a very simple answer. Is there an energy crisis? Obviously the answer is, "no." We have plenty of energy in lots of different forms. We have so much energy, in fact, that we celebrate that excess once every four years by having thousands of athletes come from all over the world to expend it in front of hundreds of millions of pairs of eyes glued to television sets around the world.

But seriously, there is not an energy crisis, we have plenty. For instance, we have enough solar energy hitting our planet to last us for millions of years to come (really, until the sun explodes, after which I don't think we'll care). There's tons and tons of wind energy every day that goes untapped and unused. There is an abundance of fuel for both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion energy (we're just not sure how to use one of those yet). 

Sure we seem to have a problem with coal and oil (it's expensive, people die getting it out of the ground, people die trying to keep it from other people, it's fouling up our atmosphere, etc.). The solution, obviously, is to drill into the bottom of the ocean and look for more of this lovely stuff, right? Our country and much of the rest of the world is so dependent on oil and all those other technologies are decades away that our only solution is to open up more fields for drilling. Right?

Here's the thing. No. That's exactly wrong. What needs to happen is that this country needs to give the imagined "energy crisis" the same high priority that we have given to other urgent needs in the past (like the need to blow entire cities off the face of the earth). So here's the plan.

Once Barack Obama is elected president of the United States, he establishes as his highest priority the goal of energy independence for the United States. To do this he gathers a thousand (or two thousand, I don't know, however many it takes) of the best minds that we have, puts them in a room (okay, maybe a town in New Mexico), and keeps them there until they figure this thing out. The would have to go in with no preconceived notions or political agendas of which energy source is the best one to be developed, and they would have to come out with the ability to move immediately to build and implement the infrastructure (windmills, nuclear fusion plants, orbiting solar arrays, all of the above, something else) that will obviate the need for using any foreign or even domestic oil in this country. 

Now obviously this would be a huge investment of time and money and talent, but it is something that would in the very short term, save us all a lot of time, energy money and lives. Here's how. First, I firmly believe that these technologies can be developed quickly and effectively and that our nation's infrastructure can be re-engineered to adapt to them in a very short time if it has to happen or if there is a strong enough push for it. If we ran out of oil tomorrow, this is exactly what we would do, so why not do it anyway. Second, the phenomenal amount of savings we would realize from switching away from buying foreign oil to develop and using our own (free) natural resources would be monumental even in the short term. Third, no more wars for oil. No more presidents who kill in the name of national security on the basis of "our" oil being under "their" soil. That's a good thing.

We could call is the Brooklyn Project (though the Los Angeles Project might be more appropriate), and it would be the first time in more than 40 years that our country could actually feel good about a huge undertaking to make our world better (remember how we felt when we landed on the Moon? This would be kind of the same.)

There's one other solution to our energy "crisis." Hook Michael Phelps up to a water wheel and let him go.

Any questions?