| Seeing a comment like this on a forum like this makes me sad. First, economics isn't a zero-sum game. You could waste that check away on destroying a country and impoverishing millions due to the threat of imaginary weapons, or you could build something. For a long time I thought wind farms were surely wasteful forms of energy. I thought about all of the energy required to manufacture them, install them, and maintain them, and compared that -- in my mind -- against all of the idle wind generators that I saw at farms like the Altamont and whatever huge one there is down in southern California. Then I got some real numbers, and it turns out that I was pretty dramatically wrong: wind energy actually provides an even better energy-return-on-investment than nuclear energy. So, potentially, that $600 billion could be spent building cheaper forms of energy generation using existing technology, and developing new technology, and now you've just made a steep initial investment that will pay returns for the rest of our society's existence. That, to me, sounds like one heck of a good deal. And it's good for the environment too. [1]: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(... |