[extropy-chat] POLITICS: oil and strategies

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 05:42 PM 6/25/2004 -0700, The Avantguardian
> wrote:
> >Take the top scientists from our universities,
> >put them on a military base in some desert, and
> give
> >them one year to come up with one or more
> alternative
> >energy sources to oil. The challenge would be to
> make
> >it so that the new fuel be easy to synthesize,
> store,
> >and allow existing gasoline and diesel engines to
> >operate on it with a minimum of upgrading.
> 
> Fuel is not all that oil is used for.
> 
> Plus: There's a lot of money and political clout in
> the existing oil 
> industry. Some argue that cheap access to reliable
> supply is exactly what 
> motivated the Iraq wars to begin with. Maybe so,
> maybe not, but the current 
> interests aren't going to be happy about any govt
> program to make them 
> irrelevant--unless they're granted a very large
> piece of the action. I'd 
> like to hear some analysis from historically
> knowledgeable people here, 
> such as Steve Davies.

Hear, hear.  Besides, who's to say big money won't
just suck up any resources thrown at this while
leaving the problem unsolved, so they can suck up the
next effort too, like they do most other serious
initiatives to address this sort of problem?
Consider why, e.g., it took until now to get serious
private spaceflight.  And fusion power was 50 years
away, 50 years ago; now it's 50 years away.  The
Manhattan Project worked in part because the moneyed
interests were convinced interference wasn't
profitable (insofar as it might cost them the war,
and thus their businesses).