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Manhattan Project For Energy Independence

June 26th, 2008
By PATRICK EDABURN

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One of the least reported stories recently is that of Virginia Congressman Randy Forbes. So far it has gotten coverage from just the Wall Street Journal and Tom Sullivan Show, plus a few other people.

Forbes has been in the House since 2001 and has recently made a very interesting proposal which is being ignored by both his fellow legislators and the media in general. Forbes has looked to history and seen something he thinks we need to bring back.

During World War 2 the nation was faced with the prospect of defeat by foreign enemies and the threat of a terrible new weapon. Recognizing that something had to be done our government began a crash program and in less than a decade went from theory to practice in the development of the Atomic Bomb.

Nearly two decades later we faced a war of a different sense, a cold war with the Soviet Union. President Kennedy saw the need to fight them on every possible front. Once again we rose to the challenge and in less than a decade went from our first space launches to landing a man on the Moon.

Today Congressman Forbes sees the need to fight a third battle, this one for energy independence. Right now we are forced to either fight wars we don’t want to or to bow down to dictators around the world.

He thinks we need to move beyond this with a crash program to reduce our reliance on foreign oil by 50% in the next 10 years and another 50% in the following 10. Total energy independence by the year 2028.

His plan is to establish a commission that will consist of experts who will report to Congress what needs to be done. The goals include higher fuel efficiency in cars, more solar and biofuel energy as well as reduction in energy consumption.

Not only has this story been ignored by the media but also by his fellow legislators. They have fallen into the traditional partisan roles of either pushing for radical enviromental rules or simply ignoring the problem.

You would think that with $ 4-5 gas, rising energy prices across the board and the burden of our troops overseas that people would want to change, but that is not the case.

His proposal is well covered in the WSJ article and deserves to be heard. If you are a reader of this blog, please contact your members of the House and Senate and urge them to support this proposal.

It is far from perfect and certainly will require a lot of adjustment to work out, but it is at least something less than the partisan gruel being put forth by everyone else.



This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Oil, Gas Prices, Wall Street Journal, News, Environment, Congress, Economy, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 4 Comments

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    The government is incapable of doing things like the Manhattan Project. Can anyone image General Leslie R. Groves going in front of Congress to explain his minority contracting program or how he plans to promote more women to middle management positions or whether the Environmental Impact Statement and Reocrd of consideration had been completed.

    . The reason that the Manhattan Project was different is that it had only one goal and everything was focused on it. Also, much of the science was already know and the project was engineering to develop the components. A better equivalent would be a Manhatten Project for hydrogen fule cells.

    In the current atmosphere, the energy manhattan project would be a pork laden program with multiple goals and would probably fail.
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    The need to improve the level of energy independence (being completely indpendent is a very far -off, if not unattainable goal) has been trumpeted for years.
    This is nothing new.

    It isn't leadership that is lacking, in this post-Bush era, it's the ability to coalesce around a plan of HOW to go about it. That shouldn't be dismissed as mere fractiousness.
    The HOW has consequences that can determine the very fabric of our society. Who will be the winners and losers, who will pay for the cost, and who will reap the beneifts are all vital questions that have to be considered seriously and in depth.

    Failure to do so in the Industrial age, and more recently, when globalization took hold, has had enormous consequences, some of them devastating to large swaths of the population. Then there comes the backlash.

    We could determine the HOW by presidential decree. In a democracy, it's more difficult. While frustrating, ,the advantage is that we do have this window of opportunity to conconsider consequences as well as alternative approaches.
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    Superdestroyer: The example I routinely think of is an Apollo Project begun today, rather than more than forty years ago, which would feature not only dysfunction and petty politics but even PC stuff such as the composition of the crew aboard the spacecraft and walking on the moon.
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    Standing around saying how it's not going to work is much like the people walking behind Sysiphus telling how to push the rock uphill.
 
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