Catawba;1059291855]If you want to address a problem, it helps to know what caused it. Just sticking your head in the sand over the last 40 years does nothing.
I personally think most people know what the problem is, and when it started, but sticking your head in the sand now, and worrying about the past does nothing to solve the problem today.
"An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), under United States environmental law, is a document required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for certain actions "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment".[1] An EIS is a tool for decision making. It describes the positive and negative environmental effects of a proposed action, and it usually also lists one or more alternative actions that may be chosen instead of the action described in the EIS."
Environmental impact statement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
All that information is passed on to the group doing the design work, before drawings are ever submitted for approval. The job of the permitting office is to confirm that what they had been given is already in their drawings and specs. It's as simple as that. 3 to 5 years to obtain a permitt is just plain politics, and nothing else.
Agreed. The American public will make the decision in any case.
agreed
I believe the term for conservative Democrats is blue-dog Democrats.
and I believe an awful lot of them were voted out in the 2010 elections were they not ?
The fact of the matter is we can do more through energy conservation than our remaining cheap oil supplies will allow, and we are not adding to GW in the process. We have to think long-term and not continue to choose short-term "fixes" that create worse long-term problems.
Again let me make it clear, I'm not arguing against conserving, that is a good thing, the only point I'm trying to make, is that by drilling and using our own oil, while conserving, and while furthering our research into an affordable alternate, can't do any harm, and in the short term do nothing but good. In my opinion, it would beat running out of oil, and shutting down our economy for however long it took to find that alternate fuel. Also any money it saves being shipped out to the middle east is just a plus. Again it's not the solution, most I know agree with that, but it's a way to lessen our need of imported oil, create jobs, and keep the cost of oil somewhat reasonable while the search for our alternate fuel continues.
Not at all. We have the capacity to conserve more oil than we get from the ME, which would free up the trillions we are spending on wars to keep the oil flowing that could then be used to help build our clean energy infrastructure. Passive solar design, for example, is not a new concept. The construction of passive solar buildings date back at least as far as our Colonial period. There is much that can be done to conserve our energy needs with known technologies and concepts that are not being done on a wide scale basis. But because, we have been too complacent over the last 40 years, yes, there will be a price to pay. And the longer we wait to act, the more painful the transition will be. You can't ignore a known problem for 40 years and be all surprised by the consequences of your actions when the pain is felt.
The problem with many of the things we have now, like solar panels, is they just aren't affordable, I personally looked at switching to solar for my own home, and the price range was around $50,000. Wind altho price wise is rather cheap, I think many will have the same complaints as they do oil, and that is what it does to the landscape, those wind turbines 3 stories tall and 20 to 30 of them on a 40 acre plot are no more appealing then one oil well pumping away on the same 40 acres.
This is why I say, that anything that is remotely going to replace oil, is still years out. The quickest that I'm aware of for our autos is going to be natural gas, and again personally I have no idea what the hold up on that is.
I don't think we are really that far apart on many things, and I agree that we should have been doing some of this stuff after the gas shortages of the 70's. We didn't however, and it does no good to look back and place blame, there is enough of that to go around on all sides. We need to look for solutions now, not who is to blame, or why we didn't take action sooner, that is history, and can't be changed.
