Wind energy is the Liberal equivalent of Conservative 'drill, drill, drill'. Easy to say because we know it will never happen on a scale big enough to prove it won't work. There isn't enough energy there to make it worth our while. Like solar, tidal, biofuels, geothermal, hydro, tar sands, oil shale, fusion or any of these other green or advanced technologies; it is too little too late. They are either relying on a resource that is already tapped out, or will not yield enough energy to make a difference overall in time to do any good.

Natural gas may have a future, but who's going to pay for the conversion, or the financial inefficiency of maintaining parallel delivery and marketing systems? You know all those commercials on TV are prep for the inevitable call for government subsidies to support a natural gas market. Every time the energy lobby pulls out that skinny blonde I reach for my wallet. That's the drilling they're really good at.

Barring some technological breakthrough (which I am convinced everyone is working feverishly for in the background, but which probably won't come in time to help, if ever) there is only a limited handful of options we can rely on.

Conservation is the best bet, but only if enforced by law. Market enforcement will never be enough and will always come too late as long as the Saudis have any oil left to sell and don't care what happens in the future. Nuclear, and coal, in that order our next best bet. Everything else is ideological wishful thinking, something-for-nothing wet dreams from both right and left.

We've known this since the 70s, but nuclear looked so good at the time we didn't worry about it too much; we never implemented conservation because the business community wouldn't hear it. We had an economy dependent on extravagant energy consumption, they weren't about to mess around with that. Conservation is most effective when the need for it seems least pressing. So it never gets done in time to buy us any time or do us any good.

Nuclear didn't pan out because the business community wasn't willing to pay for the necessary safety infrastructure, either directly through rate hikes or indirectly through taxation, and the environmentalists refused to compromise on their exaggerated safety concerns. (Yes, TB. They were exaggerated, not non-existent.) Besides, as long as oil was cheap no one worried about tomorrow.

Coal is plentiful, although the environmental costs of mining it are probably even worse than the pollutants produced by burning it. It will probably be the way we wind up going, because its cheaper than nuclear. Lets just hope the particulates increase the albedo and helps counteract global warming.