Why This Deafening Silence about Our Most Viable Solution to the Energy Crisis? by Edwin Young (Polemic)

Why This Deafening Silence about Our Most Viable Solution to the Energy Crisis?
by Edwin Young

The ongoing debate, and the framing of it, between the Senate and the heads of the major oil companies, is a completely irrelevant and devastating approach to solving our energy crisis. The question is not whether the oil companies should or could solve the gasoline crisis. Rather, the question is how the government can immediately begin to stimulate alternative sources of energy and, furthermore, which of the contemplated alternatives they should stimulate or subsidize.

As alternatives, coal, nuclear, and ethanol pale when set beside the benefits of hydrogen as the potential for solving the domestic and world energy crisis as well as the crisis in global warming and pollution of the air, water, and earth. Hydrogen could be mobilized, quickly and universally, to solve our problem. It is far more ready to swing into action than the media and legislators are leading us to believe. When hydrogen is backed up and shored up with wind and solar, the latter especially for rural areas, the energy crisis would not only be solved quickly, cleanly, and efficiently, but this three-pronged approached would be exponentially more cost effective.

However, the transition to hydrogen, wind, and solar, to the almost total exclusion of oil, nuclear, and coal, would mean a massive displacement and reallocation of our nation’s work force. Of course, with our current corporate globalization and its policy of labor outsourcing, there has already been a massive displacement of the work force. Ironically, this transitional initiative would usher in a vast new range of employment opportunities and bring us out of this chaos.

Of course, this transition would also have global effects that would mean a massive disruption of both domestic and international financial and employment systems. On the other hand, if properly forewarned and educated through the current global media outlets, the US and other nations could meet that challenge successfully.

Countries, such as in the Middle East, whose economies are solely dependent upon the oil industry, would be faced with the greatest near-term hardships. Nevertheless, in the long-term, a beneficial by-product of such massive realignments around the globe would be a dramatic reduction in conflicts between nations that is caused by the current and growing fierce competition for oil, exploitation of workers, formidable imbalances in finance and trade, and global warming and pollution of the earth.

If the US and the rest of the world are made aware of these impending worldwide changes quickly, we all have the financial resources and organizational knowhow to reorient our populations to a new set of industries on a new economic basis. In addition, we have the UN that could assist the international community in finding ways to mediate and work toward these goals cooperatively.

Please pass this on to fellow legislators, media outlets and spokespersons, and other national and international leaders.

We must not remain silent about our most viable solution to so many of our worldwide crises which is the energy triumvirate of hydrogen, wind, and solar.




Author bio:

Edwin Young is working on a book tentatively called, "Can There Be a Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy?" Links to some of his essays can be found at The Natural Systems Institute.