Lets burn all the rainforests and plant sugar cane to provide the ethanol. Will need a lot of that given the poor fuel efficiency of ethanol.

Those rainforests contain lots of horrid spiders anyway, so down with them trees. Good on you George.

clett:

What you're proposing is doable. We managed to reduce our 100% electric home daily consumption from 65 KWh to 35 KWh with similar measures. Next objective is to reduce to 25 KWh/day by moving to a better built place.

The energy saved is enough to operate 3 PHEVs or BEVs. Most (but not all) Amercian/Canadian could do the same.

We have also reduced fuel consumption by 50% by getting ride of our V-8 and V-6 gas guzzlers and replacing them with more efficient 4 cyl ICE and hybrids. We plan to buy our first PHEVs in 2009/2010.

Note: We can get up to $4000 rebate/credit on the purchase of more fuel efficient vehicle (5.5 L/100Km or better). Gas guzzler buyers have to paid a penalty of up to $4000 (above 13.5 L/100KM)

The new energy required for population growth could come from cleaner sources such as wind, solar, waves and even nuclear.

Burning most (if not all) our garbage and waste (many million tonnes a year) with plasma burners could also produce clean electricity while getting rid of growing polluting refuse that nobody wants. The by-product (glass like pebbles) can be used as road building material.

At least from my experiences, most CRP land is not ideal for farming. Land that ended up as CRP land was not wanted by the local farmers due to it being swampy, infertile, rocky, inaccessable, or just not a large enough parcel to be worth working.

And they are not "sitting there not growing anything". They are dedicated to provide pockets of native flora/fauna in the midst of miles and miles of monoculture cropland. They provide safe havens for wildlife that we otherwise have no shelter when the fields are harvested.

'California has been a global leader' in a culture of consumption of resources. They can be proud of using less energy to heat their houses than those wasteful Vermounters.

Notice that lead in producing biofuels and renewable energy electricity is occurring in other states. Biofuels is one area where production has exceeded expectation. Wind is doing well too. The 2005 Energy Bill was aggressive and comprehensive. It is likely that some of the things in the 1000+ pages legislation will bear fruit, but the ball is rolling.

I think carbon caps are extremely bad policy and poorly thought out.

If politicans (and the citizens who elect them) were serious about reducing oil usage they would start a ramp up in taxes on fossel fuel and the consumption pattern would start to change. It is also possible to put a higher purchase tax on vehicles based on the amount they pollute.
These are not new ideas; the Europeans have been doing this for decades.
At the very least, congress should remove the tax incentive for businesses to buy heavy vehicles. As a small businessman I can write off in one year almost the entire purchase price of a vehicle that weighs over 6,000 pounds but only a fraction of a vehicle which gets 50 mpg.

The only way your ever going to see a hihjer tax on fuel is if it comes from swapping out some OTHER tax. And right now the only alternative that will work long term is converting from income to consumption based taxing. As letaface facts the lobbies on all sides of that hornets nest are BIG and NASTY. I dont realy think any ONE person or small group has enough clout to hammer through anything useful as far as taxes go.

If our density is too low for mass transit, what do you propose we should do to wean ourselves off the arab teet? Nothing?
Regardless of whether you're talking a few years or twenty years, the plentiful oil will slow to a trickle within our lifetimes. We can't wait for that to happen and then react, we need to plan for it.
I know most Americans won't stomach the higher tax, but then again most americans do want to get off the oil. It seems we want to do it, but we won't vote to do.

I think we need a multipronged marketing campaign to push for a switch to post oil tecnology. Market global warming to the lefties and market nation and financial security to the righties. Both would have the same message, including raising the gas tax.

If you want to reduce income taxes as a countermeasure, you'd have to scale it back up as consumption of gas decreases.

what do you propose we should do to wean ourselves off the arab teet?
Take military possession of the arab teet.

DS:

When you're joking you might want to include ";)" just to make sure that nobody thinks you're serious.

Mandating results rather than methods is the smart way to go. How one motivates people to acheive those results is a second question.

I'm for doubling CAFE standards for all passenger vehicles (and and if a truck seats 3 or more it is a passenger vehicle)in the next 15 years. I'm also for using a flexible tax to create a "floor" for oil prices. Probably $70/barrel would do.

Caps are interesting but require more control. Think of it like a diet. If you just say, "I will not eat ice cream," but then substitute Girl Scout cookies, you don't lose any weight. If you cap it and say, "I will not eat more than 1800 calories per day," you will probably lose weight no matter what stuff you eat. Counting calories (or carbon) is not as simple, and requires more effort. Raising the cost of food (or oil), doesn't necessarily cause affluent citizens to cut back, but it does hit lower income citizens harder. If we could make caps work, they would probably be the best for the average consumer, but enforcement is a challenge.

However, taxes and CAFE standards don't get people off of oil unless there is a lower-cost alternative. Every renewable energy source helps.

One of the things the government can do is buy billions of dollars worth of photovoltaic capacity. The reason microchips are cheap today is because the government bought huge amounts of chips for missiles in the 1960's and it jumpstarted the market. There was still competition and a free market, but it was pulled up the learning curve and economies-of-scale curve much faster because of the early demand of a large, predictable customer. There have to be some federal buildings and military bases in the South and South West that could use the solar power and resilience of being mostly off the grid.

While I agree with Gov. Schwarzenegger that the bill neglects the carbon footprint of some alternative fuel technologies, government mandates for such a new/world-changing industry are necessary.

Without government support, investors would not be diving in head-first into alternative energy technologies. I do not think we can place biofuel investments in the same category as traditional investments. If biofuels were synthetic gasolines that could be used in un-modified engines and were produced cheaper than conventional gasoline, government support would not be necessary. Biofuels have to prove themselves with the help of the government to gain consumer adoption.

I hope that Energy Secretary Bodman considers Gov. Schwarzenegger's concerns and adjusts the bill accordingly with sound, unbiased (is this possible in this industry!?) research.

The new standard would require US ethanol and alternative fuel consumption to reach 10 billion gallons in 2010. Alternative fuel use would then slowly rise through 2014, and ramp up the following three years to reach 35 billion gallons annually in 2017.