[CaptainHaplo]

Zachstar.... I want you to make sure your sitting down.

For once, we actually agree on something. At least, in the "big picture". Your absolutely right in that a catastrophic collapse would cause unimaginable damage to the ecology. A return to "simple living" would be anything but, because between that section of humanity that COULDN'T survive in such a situation, and the mass of "consumers" that nature would be forced to support in a MUCH less "ecological friendly" way that it does now, would devastate the environment as we know it.

I also agree that we, as a country, should be leading the way in finding responsible ways to meet our needs while moving away from petroleum.

The problem isn't your party, or any of the other parties. The problem is the POWER PEOPLE in the parties. Almost all of them are, in one way or the other, more inclined to keep the status quo, because that protects their personal power.

Our electrical needs could be met easily with nuke power alone. In addition, a nuke plant is ideally suited to provide the power (and heat) necessary to produce hydrogen. One study indicated a modern nuke plant dedicated to hydrogen production would have an output equal to 400,000 gallons of gasoline - PER DAY! That's ONE plant.Move to hydrogen fuel cells for POV's and you have cut a huge amount of pollution out of our economy.

Now, nuclear plants emit NO carbon - thats right, we are talking ZERO emissions here. However, they do have one drawback - the "waste".

But there is an answer. Right now, when the fuel is "spent", its hauled to Yucca and buried - but the bugger is that the fuel still has 95% of its energy UNUSED! This is bad for the environment because your storing this crud in the earth, not to mention you are creating waste when you should be using as much of that stored energy as you can! Dr. Claudio Filippone has already developed and demonstrated how his project - called CAESAR (or Clean And Environmentally Safe Advanced Reactor) can create "ultra-spent" remnants from regular (non-enriched) Uranium while creating electricity. This solves the problem of "breeder" reactors which create weapons grade waste and thus are huge problems. Existing reactors need ENRICHED uranium - which then creates proliferation problems. CAESAR uses non-enriched fuel (once started) so its resultant "leftovers" are tremendously less harmful.

Proliferation concerns resolved, waste concerns resolved, ecological concerns resolved, and it moves us further toward being able to actually ACCESS other clean fuel sources that will continue to wean us off petroleum.

Its not pie in the sky wind farms, its not a Biomass farm that would have to be the size of Iowa 10 times over to meet our current energy needs. Its here, workable, safe and clean.