Re: hyper inflation in the USA?
I don't want to piss away all of our oil when we can still buy it cheap, but right now there isn't a free market for world oil. there is a cartel actively working to maintain a price several times their cost. I sure would like to influence this marginal supply, to break the cartel and push the world price closer to the true economic cost to extract that oil. So we would still be buying a lot of oil, but paying a lot less...
Note: this is easier to say than do. Demand for oil in developing countries is growing faster than we can slow our use, or easily add supply. IMO it would take more than just restarting drilling to get on top of marginal supply.
re: transportation, I still think we are missing the boat by not exploiting natural gas. This is already used for transportation in other regions. Even just using this for fleet vehicles would help in the margin, and converting heavy trucking would help a bunch.
While fuel cells are another science fair project , I think you can even run fuel cells on NG, but I don't expect you would get a drinking water pure exhaust product. You can probably crack NG to get hydrogen, but again, probably less efficient than just burning the NG.
New power plants are already taking advantage of the surfeit of NG, but indeed the elephant in the room for electric cars is that the power still needs to be generated somehow. For now there is enough off peak capacity to absorb the small volume, and if these were sold at actual cost without taxpayer subsidies, we wouldn't need to worry about generation capacity for a long time.
I just want some common sense applied, not typical, politically correct, feel good policies, that don't add up.
As Phil mentioned there are a new generation of safer (smaller) nuclear power plants, but we are generally not receptive to lots of smaller nuclear power plants in more of our own back yards, or increasing several fold the number of nuclear sites to worry about. Looking at the situation in japan, it seems like these new generation nukes would be an ideal solution for their future needs, but the odds of them expanding their nuclear footprint for the moment at least looks pretty slender.
JR
