I think the thing to remember about research is that it will give you breakthroughs ... but not always the ones you expected.

As an easy illustration, compare the "future" predicted by decades of Popular Science covers to the "future" we got.

Both futures are weird and advanced, but not exactly in the ways people predicted.

And sometimes ... no matter how much we wanted flying cars, jet packs, or hydrogen fuel cells ... they were always just a few more decades away.

This illogical logic really chaps my hide too. (And you know I'm mad when I start actually sounding like a Texan). The other trick people like to use to knock down renewables is to say that they couldn't meet 100% of our electricity needs. Last time I checked no single source provides all of our electricity.

There was an op-ed contribution to the New York Times at the end of March that really got me steamed as well. Clean coal advocates tried to bolster their technology by knocking down various other technologies. Their two sentence dismissal of solar was especially egregious. I wrote this letter to the editor in response. The NY Times didn't bother to print it so I'll take the liberty of reproducing it here in full. Maybe it will help others expose some of the logical fallacies of clean energy opponents.

To the Editor:

While supportive of new, emerging coal technologies and carbon capture and storage, I believe Thomas Homer-Dixon and S. Julio Friedman were unduly negative - and potentially misleading - about the potential impact of established solar power technology in their recent op-ed. (`Coal in a Nice Shade of Green,' March 25, 2005). They dismissed solar power as needing too much space and being too costly. According to the authors, in order to meet our current electricity demand, the United States would need 10 billion square meters of photovoltaic (PV) panels - a big number indeed, but one without context. Did readers know that the land area of the conterminous 48 states is over 8 trillion square meters or that the built environment in the U.S. covers almost 30 billion square meters? Probably not. Unlike carbon capture and storage, PV panels can be used today on rooftops and integrated into buildings to produce power on site and without carbon dioxide emissions. Costs are still high, but continue to decrease, especially when PV panels replace other building materials like windows or shingles. Over the next 25 years, we will add another 20 billion square meters to the built environment - much of it in the sunny South and West - offering a prime opportunity to build a bridge to a clean energy future.

Sincerely,
Ana Unruh Cohen, Ph.D
Associate Director for Environmental Policy
Center for American Progress
Washington, DC

"The book of nature is always open." - Louis Agassiz

As odograph points out research is unpredicatable. We need to invest in fission, fusion, wind, solar, tidal etc to find which ones turn out to be the best for the future, and to derail the fossil fuel juggernaut.

Nick Kristof used the same old talking points about solar and wind in his op/ed on energy.

Misleading use of statistics is usually part of the sophistry against renewable energy.  And many liberals like Kristof are falling for it.

It was surprising to see Stewart Brand and James Lovelock doing this also.  

If one were to add up all the area polluted by mines, refineries, processing plants, waste sites, generating plants for fossil fuels and nuclear power, and the exponentially expanding plumes of toxins in groundwater, rivers, lakes, and air from these energy sources...

Then compare that to the 50 foot diameter area needed for each of 30,000 thousand foot scale wind machines needed to equal the present electrical generating capacity of the US....the picture looks a bit different.

And consider not only rooftops for solar electric power, but also space over parking lots that need shading anyway.  And solar cogeneration that produces not only electricity (which absorbs only 10% of the solar power available), but heating and cooling capacity and water/waste recycling or desalinization from the same collectors.  Water is the oil of this century.

By substituting heat pumps for heating instead of fuel oil and natural gas, and hybrid plugin vehicles that use mostly electric power on short trips (the vast majority of driving miles), that electric capacity created by wind and solar power can substitute for expensive greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels.

For instance,20% of oil is burned to provide heat energy for refining oil, a huge waste.  Easily replaced with clean solar heat or wind and solar electric power driving heat pumps.

Do we really need 30,000 20 megawatt wind machines on the high apeed wind areas of the great plains?  Yes because a switch to heat pumps and hybrid plugin vehicles will require even more electric generating capacity.  

With the added capacity from solar electric panels on rooftops, and over parking lots wind and solar could economically replace fossil and nuclear power for transportation as well as heating, cooling,refining, and manufacturing.

The old fossil fuel plants would serve as backup and a kind of battery to smooth out variable output from wind and solar and variable loads in the power grid.  Eventually they could be replaced by superconducting energy storage rings and maybe someday with fuel cells.

With hybrid plugin vehicles averaging 80 miles per gallon, biofuels could replace imported oil.  As battery technology, backup generators, and eventually fuel cells increase in efficiency and drop in cost, those biofuels, like methanol, ethanol,and biodiesel could totally replace oil.

None of this is as farfetched as a nuclear plant with pebble bed or other research level technology actually overcoming the problems of uninsurable risk for siting, fuel mining and manufacturing, and waste transportation, processing, and storage (20 to 30 tons per year per nuclear reactor).  

Coupled with nuclear fuel expected to triple in price over the next few years, and the fact that wind and solar have no fuel or waste costs...it all paints a very different picture of energy policy.

We need to push hard for this energy policy that would revive the US manufacturing base, tax base, and provide good jobs for american families.  

The export markets created for our clean energy technology would power an economic boom based on real productivity increases, rather than an economic bubble from speculation.

Let's have an ENERGY revolution!!!