2013 Prediction: Energy Levels The Field

Energy is wealth. An energy policy that punishes cheap energy sources and subsidizes impractical high cost energy sources is the cruelest tax on the poorest members of our society. The Obama Energy Policy is responsible for our current high unemployment and slow economic growth. It needs to be dumped if America is to thrive and prosper.

@ Peter_Grynch: Thank you for that very unscientific rant. It further illustrates the lack of ability for most Americans to see beyond their own generation and into the near and distant futures or to use logic or reasoning instead of often self-defeating, hypocritical ideology. You champion cheap energy now, but fail to realize that public funding of test bed projects for renewable energies ultimately lead to effective new technologies at a scale enabling cheaper $/kW than existing cheap, dirty energy.
I see the downfall of the coal industry as society's progress, just as the downfall of the horse and carriage industry ushered in a transportation revolution. Step outside of yourself and try to see the forest for the trees.....your grandchildren will thank you.

@derosanick82: Thank you for your ecofacist rant. Wind power and terrestrial solar power are both notoriously unreliable. Continuing to subsidize them is really counter-productive. Since we would have to install 4 times rated capacity just to average their rated capacity and continue using fossil fuels as backup even with massive storage capacity, wind is untenable and absolutely uneconomic.

Solar is even worse because of weather and the fact that it can only operate in daylight. Even the thermal solar systems that try to store heat energy have limited usefulness.

Depending on intermittent, unreliable, "renewable" power generation to run our cities just because environmentalists have blessed them as "green" is not a rational thing to do.

If you want to have clean energy to power the future of the human race derosanick82, you should be supporting and promoting hydro-power, nuclear power and solar power satellites built using extraterrestrial materials.

L5Rick

@derosanick
Maybe your grandchildren will thank you, that they are living in a country that is starved of energy and industrially completely uncompetetive and backwards, because their grandfathers took the wrong decision when it counted and bet on an unproven technology. We all know what it takes to make renewables work: Live like the Amish! If you want clean cheap reliable and proven power, with a minimal environmental footprint, go nuclear.