“Personally, it’s best to build up as much infrastructure as possible for future demand.”
I agree with you 100%. Any money spent on developing domestic energy supplies is a good investment. The only exception are feel good “green energy” projects which can only make it with huge government subsidies. I speak of course of windmills, solar panel farms, and biofuels. Everyone of which is a huge waste of time and resources and each cost up to dozens of times more per kwh of energy than traditional sources such as oil, natural gas and coal.
The only good “green energy” is hydro power which the state I live in, Washington does not consider to be environmentally friendly. Even during the Enron scandle existing hydro-power facilities were being denied their operating permits and being shut down. I say build some good fish ladders and dam every stream. Then build more dams on the streams and rivers that already have dams. It is especially frustrating to me when we have a giant flood control dam on the Green River a few miles from where I live and they want to spend hundreds of millions of Federal dollars fixing it up, but don’t want to use it to generate any electricity. What a huge waste of a natural resource. It is maddening. I am certain that a utility would step forward and rebuild the dam for free if they got to sell the power.
If the rare fish that don’t make good eating can’t make it up the fish ladders, then stock the lakes with fish that grow bigger and taste better. Only this time around can we take a little extra time to cut the stumps off flush with the ground or use an appropriate amount of diesel and ammonium nitrate to blow them out of the ground? We don’t want to be tearing up expensive outboard motors when the water level goes down.