The electric grid gets cleaner even without renewables. Clean coal is a rapidly growing area in electricity production and nuclear production continues to increase.

Having to create electricity to meet our energy demand is a fantastic problem to have. Energy independence should be an economic goal of any developed country. You don't want ANY foreign control of 7% of your GDP, let alone a cartel like OPEC.

>Energy independence should be an economic goal of any developed country.

Why? The whole idea of comparative advantage is that you can increase your overall standard of living by making the things that you are best at and importing everything else. The only reason why you would want to be independent is if you planned on fighting a war with all the other countries in the world at the same time (granted, this could be the policy of our current US administration). Interdependence creates peace.

If China attacks Taiwan, they will have the huge percentage of their GDP that consists of trade with the US on the line. So I consider outright military conflict unlikely. However, if we were as "independent" as you suggest I think war would be much more likely.

Why again is independence a good thing?

Uh, sorry. I think you've got it completely backwards. Why do you think the framers were so concerned about being "entangled in foreign alliances"? The kind of entanglements you propose will prevent war are exactly the kind we should be avoiding because they could very well draw us into wars we don't want to be in.

"Energy Independence" is probably a misnomer - but the point is to change our economics so that we aren't forced to provide advantage to our geostrategic adversaries. Because our economy is so dependent on oil, we currently have little choice but to fund those who currently fund our (the U.S. and the rest of the West) enemies. The desire is simply to make oil a commodity like any other, and not one that can make or break the U.S. In other words, we need something to give us the ability to tell the Saudis to kiss off.

>In other words, we need something to give us the ability to tell the Saudis to kiss off.

And then we can invade the Saudis! Brilliant!

What I'm arguing is that being able to tell the Saudis to kiss off means we won't ever have a reason to invade them.

Realize I'm using "the Saudis" as a proxy here. But further:

Can you imagine a scenario in which the following things are true:

a) we buy, say, 40% less oil overall

b) we have the same tensions with SA and Iran as we do now

c) SA and Iran are as rich as they are now (translate: capable of financing terror groups to fight proxy wars) ?

I can't.

<sarcasm>Because we know that foreign energy dependence has kept us from waging war on other countries.</sarcasm>

President Clinton turned the biggest source of clean coal in the world into a national monument. Curiously, the folks who owned the second biggest source (in Indonesia) were big campaign contributors.

There's no such thing as clean coal, it's an oxymoron made up by energy companies, it's newspeak! What's next, dry water?

he's not talking about renewables, this plan would involve building many more coal plants. Browntech. We're going to burn through the coal, even once we convert the southwest to a solar farm we are still going to need mor energy. And we have a lot of coal.

And the cost of the ensuing clean up? It's more than zero.

It's better to burn coal in an industrial energy production facility that has cleaning technologies than for there to be millions of internal combustion engines. The economies of scale reduce externalities. I would hope a government good enough to give its people free electric cars would invest another trillion dollars in clean coal.

Why not nuclear?

Wikipedia: Contrary to popular belief, coal power actually results in more radioactive waste being released into the environment than nuclear power. The population effective dose equivalent from radiation from coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear plants.

Nuclear power is not actually as economical as other forms of electricity, which is why, even with massive government subsidies, there aren't any new nuclear plants being built in the US.

source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/parenti

Actually, nuclear is not as economical as other forms of energy after all the US govt. red tape is accounted for. If that were not the case, much of Japan and several countries in Europe would not get a majority of their power from nuclear power plants.

Along with the "US govt. red tape", there are US subsidies for plant construction (read the article linked to above), and US law limits the liability of nuclear-plant operators in case of accident.

The governments of those other countries provide even more subsidies to their nuclear industries.

He mentioned nuclear, too. But are there not even less resources than oil?

We could use nuclear for 100% of our energy needs for the next 5 to 10 thousand years (assuming everyone in the world uses as much energy as people in the US and a world population under 20 billion.) If we switch to fusion we would have energy well into the billions of years range.

The problem with fusion energy is that nobody got it to work yet. Unless you count solar power.

I've heard other numbers about the nuclear energy, but anyway - time will tell.

Uranium is vary common. On average you could extract more energy from coal by using the trace amount of fissionable material in coal than you get by setting the stuff on fire.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power) As of 2004, nuclear power provided 6.5% of the world's energy... At this point, the enriched uranium, containing more than the natural 0.7% U-235, is used to make rods of the proper composition and geometry for the particular reactor that the fuel is destined for. The fuel rods will spend about 3 operational cycles (typically 6 years total now) inside the reactor, generally until about 3% of their uranium has been fissioned, then they will be moved to a spent fuel pool where the short lived isotopes generated by fission can decay away. After about 5 years in a cooling pond, the spent fuel is radioactively and thermally cool enough to handle, and it can be moved to dry storage casks or reprocessed. As opposed to current light water reactors which use uranium-235 (0.7% of all natural uranium), fast breeder reactors use uranium-238 (99.3% of all natural uranium). It has been estimated that there is up to five billion years’ worth of uranium-238 for use in these power plants.[33]

PS: The five billion year figure makes some assumptions about the rate of use but once you start looking into the numbers it's far enough into the future that our predictions are just about meaningless.

Edit: There are a lot of odd regulations and political history around whey we do it this way but long term supply is not the real issue with fission.