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We need a massive nation-wide effort to switch to alternatives.

So how do you propose we do this? By government fiat?

It would take an estimated $5 trillion to generate all the worlds electricity with wind. That isnt a bad investment as far as I am concerned.

If this is such a good investment, why not let the market take care of it?

If the market doesn't take care of it, do you advocate some kind of subsidy?

And do you advocate paying for this subsidy by taxing me?

Actually the answers to your questions are really quite simple. All we really need to do is make the price of oil reflect its real costs.

This would have to manifest itself in yes, a tax. But let`s look at what extra costs oil cause us. I don`t honestly have the time to look up stats right now - please forgive. But, I am sure it is possible to determine that the subsidies already given to oil companies combined with the benefit of investing money in American products and American companies that could produce the equipment to generate those alternatives, that benefits might begin to look just about as good as the downsides. We can talk about the cost of approximate costs to our own and future generations of dumping the gases produced by buring oil into our atmosphere until we are blue inthe face, but that is probably a different thread.

Unfortunately, the market does not always provide the best solutions to all problems. Overshoot is probably a new concept for you (apologies if it is not), but I will explain in terms of the easiest analogy.

In left to the market, human beings will eventually overfish every single productive fishery in the ocean (and we are). The reason why is that as fish catches decline, the price for fish rises. Which, in turn encourages investors to build more boats and catch more fish, which causes there to be even fewer fish. This is a negative feedback loop. It also called in overshoot (or the tragedy of the commons). Because fish have a pretty impressive capactiy to reproduce, and in fact do better when there arent the maximum number of fish in the ocean (density) there is a fairly high sustainable catch. Unfortunately, once that optimal density is lower, there ability to reproduce declines dramatically causing a crash in the population that takes a very, very long time to recover - if ever.

Oil is a bit different and would take longer to explain, but the fundamentals are the same.

What it comes down to is that a tax on oil dedicated to switching to alternatives will improve American security (and I am sure you are willing to pay taxes for that) and independence (I`ll bet you are for that as well). This is a hard addiction to break. It is even hard to imagine, but we really really need to do it. The whole world and especially the United States would be a better place for it.