I have to defer to my husband, the engineer, on this. He has worked in both nuclear and petroleum engineering and has also designed and built wind turbines. He says that there is nothing that is as efficient in producing BTUs as oil. It’s cheap, easily recovered, and we have a ton of it and it is making more every day right under our feet.
Politics is the problem. No one in Washington really has the will to go after resources that we already own. And no one in Washington is willing to stand up against the greens in order to efficiently utilize our vast coal resources either. And when was the last time a nuclear plant was built in this country? No, our politicians are busy scrapping nuclear plants and giving them away to our enemies.
FDR established the Manhatten Project in SECRET. The people working on it didn’t know what it was and didn’t know each other. My father in law worked on it for GE Carboloy Division, and he didn’t even know what his part was for — just a real good guess after some of the details were revealed years later. There would have been a huge outcry had the nation known what was coming. When was the last time our government did anything in secret? The dopey Dems want to broadcast our withdrawal date from Irag, for crying out loud!
I totally agree with your last paragraph. We should be self sufficient as a nation. Exporting our raw materials and importing finished goods is driving us into the status of a 3rd world country! We’re almost at colony status when every need had to be met by England! Look at Toys R Us or Sam’s Club some day. Try to find anything Made In USA at the mall any more.
Bush might have been able to institute something like you are suggesting in the months after 9/11, but he doesn’t have the political capital to start such a project now.
Well, if he said he wanted to do it to eliminate the islamic threat by cutting off it's head (i.e. the fatcat sheiks and rogue nations that use oil money to fund it) then you're surely right, he couldnt make it happen with an appease-and-surrender congress like we have now. BUT if he introduced it as a giant initiative to get us "carbon neutral", to borrow a currently fashionable buzz phrase, he could use the global warming hysteria as a tool to make some progress. Also, given that context, congress could get behind it because, lets face it, a project like I'm proposing would be a pork-a-palooza. NASA was great pork too, but it led us to a useful outcome. I'd rather see the pork go to establish research labs in a next gen fuel technology than wasted on dopey welfare projects.