Last Tuesday, 15 June 2010, President Obama addressed the nation, his first address to the American People from the Oval Office. It was a rousing speech, I will give the President that. That having been said, the President did not lay out a concrete plan on how to make this country energy independent, or how to get off of fossil fuels (particularly oil) and did not call for Congress and especially the Senate to act on such a plan. Let us be frank here, private enterprise is not interested in using renewable energy until such time the use of fossil fuels becomes profit prohibitive. This is capitalism at its core, its very nature. Therefore, the state must take steps to make renewable energy more profitable and cheaper to industry and individual citizens than it is currently. Now, I have heard in my work in the streets talking with working class people not only in my home state and local area but also across the country that the thing we need is a “Apollo Program” on energy, or a “Manhattan Project” on energy.

I think that this path is wrong-headed. There is likely no silver bullet which will solve the energy problem and this is one of the reasons that renewable energy has also been held back. The question is: do we push solar, wind, nuclear (fission and/or fusion), or some other form of energy? Instead I think that we need to to use a shotgun approach to solve this question.

1. Finishing Construction of Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Facility. Granted, I understand that no one wants nuclear waste in their backyard. But nuclear fission is technology we already posses, and while it does produce highly toxic waste that has a half-life in the millions of years, safer storage of this waste must be made to receive the waste from new nuclear fission power plants that must come online and come online quickly.

2. A Manhattan Style Project to develop Nuclear Fusion Technology. The Germans, the French, the Russians, the British and the Chinese are all working on this technology. Fusion technology would be able to provide us with enough energy to basically do whatever we want. Now, I know that many people are probably asking themselves right now- what is nuclear fusion? Nuclear fusion is the opposite of nuclear fission. Nuclear fission takes large atoms like Uranium 235 and breaks them down into smaller atoms while releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Nuclear fusion starts with small atoms like hydrogen or helium-3 and makes them into bigger atoms like oxygen or carbon. In short, nuclear fusion is the energy source that the Sun uses.

3. We need a National Program of Producing a Liquid Transportation Fuel from Waste Stream Biomass and Non-Foodstuff Biomass. Ethanol and Methanol are fuels we have known about for centuries, in fact Henry Ford’s first Model-T ran on Ethanol. The first diesel engines were designed to use vegetable oils. This technology is over a century old, what is needed is a program to upscale it to modern needs.

4. We need a National Tax Policy that encourages the Use of Renewable Energies whenever Possible and Discourages the use of Fossil Fuels. This is partially done already with the Cap and Trade system for carbon which passed the House of Representatives but is currently stalled in the Senate.

5. A National Program to Low Interest Loans and Grant-funding for Private Citizens to install Solar Panels on their roofs and laws requiring local utilities to purchase solar-produced energy from these same private citizens at a premium to assist them in paying off these loans. Such a program has been in place in Germany for nearly 20 years now and works wonderfully.

6. A Revitalization of Our Passenger and Freight Rail Service in this Country. The United States is supposed to be a so-called First World Country. All other so-called First World countries have rail systems where just about anyone can catch a train and get to where they need to. The United States does not; indeed, our rail system right now is so bad that it would embarrass countries like Romania and Bulgaria which are much smaller and poorer than the U.S.

7. Emphasize Public Transportation and Light Rail. This would not only reduce pollution but also reduce wasted energy and fuel consumed without actually going anywhere during the morning commute. I cannot count how many hours I’ve spent in a traffic jam commuting to work, and I live in a smaller city in the South East. All of those cars on the highway with only one occupant are burning incalculable amounts of gasoline simply idling, not only is this polluting but it is extremely wasteful. If light rail and bus services were expanded we could transport more people on the same amount of fuel with less pollution and less cost in time, congestion and pollution.

8. Re-urbanization, the United States has its population spread all over with the car-based suburb. Now, while this might be considered the normal now, for most of human history it was not. One was either Rural or one was Urban. In an urban setting public mass transportation and light rail makes much more sense.

With these new policies in place, the APL feels that not only is energy independence obtainable, but also we will see a growth in jobs that cannot be outsourced, new jobs and technologies to revitalize the country and end the current Great Recession.

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