Newfie wrote:Outcast,
That’s why it’s so important to change folks attitudes and understandings. They see a wind turbine and think “Oh look how we are saving the planet.”
Without coupling renewable with conservation there will be no net emmission improvement, it’s just more cheap calories.
But it ISN'T cheap calories!
In another thread you mentioned how money spent on fighting in the Middle East since WW II concluded is one primary cause of 911, or at least that is what I thought you said. In part that is true, but there is another extremely large factor you kind of glossed over. Until the 1920's when Iraq, Iran and Kuwait were all selling petroleum on the world market later followed by Saudi Arabia and others the next decade the region was poor and unattractive. Oil resources brought huge wealth flows into the region, but as part of that they also brought huge numbers of Europeans and Americans and even Soviets who had radically different ideas about how people in the middle east should exist culturally.
Mix cultural difference with the competition for wealth and you get instant conflict. Then add in governments willing to use their influence to have the governments in the middle east engage in wars one against another for international advantage (the Iran-Iraq war comes to mind). Naturally the people whose lives are being mangled and changed by western money and culture are going to resent the daylights out of those factors.
Then whether you believe Israel is a rightful nation of the Holy Land or not you had western powers, struck with guilt over the slaughter of Jewish civilians in 1942-45 by Germany, force the new nation into existence in 1948. That only adds to the rage and intense loathing of the region where common people see that the international western community treat them purely as pawns in the 'great game' rather than as self determining people with goals and beliefs that are as valid as anyone else's.
Now we come to the topic of this thread. In terms of spending for or on the middle east all of the westernized nations, including Japan and South Korea, send huge sums of money there for the resources they can buy on the international market. In 1988 the largest single consumer of Petroleum Products on this planet was the government of the USA mostly for military vehicle use. The second largest and close behind was the USSR government for the exact same reason.
We have known since the 1930's viable and more or less efficient ways to manufacture liquid fuel substitutes in the form of synthetic fuel made from lignite coal (primarily). It is moderately more expensive in terms of unit cost to manufacture liquid fuel substitutes if you do a simple side by side cost ignoring externalizations. However any sound analysis would preform a whole system survey showing that if the USA had adopted on a mass scale the conversion of abundant lignite into synthetic fuel for the military we could have eliminated most if not all spending on the middle east.
Instead we hid the huge financial and social costs of importing oil from the middle east, which altered the cost benefit equation way out of reality, and we have sunk enormous funds into the Middle East as a result. Here are a couple of other factors to consider, if the USA were not importing petroleum from the middle east at all from say 1975 onward the world demand would drop significantly, just as we saw from 2008. That would leave room for other nations who wanted to import middle eastern oil to both purchase and take responsibility for defending those oil fields allowing the USA to effectively withdraw from the Persian Gulf.
That would have created a big cushion in the USA federal budget from 1975-1989. While in all likelihood the politicians would have done what they always do and wasted it it could have been used as you desire to subsidize intermittent 'renewable' wind and solar. Or it could have been used to build a few more large scale hydro-electricity dams. Or it could have been used in researching passive safe nuclear power plants in 1975 well before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Most likely it would have been wasted on vote buying for congressional members of both houses, but if we dream we should let ourselves DREAM, right?