Brace yourselves for a cold winter, especially if you're poor. USA Today reports that heating oil prices are up more than 60% from a year ago. Bills won't go up that much, but they will go up. Lat year, average heating oil bills increased almost 30%. Almost ten percent of all homes are warmed with heating oil, but they're located mostly in the liberal bastion of the Northeast, so who cares? The hardest hit will be the poor and elderly, of course. Hey President Bush, if the elderly freeze to death, can we use them as tinder for our fires? That would help the Social Security plan as well, wouldn't it? Don't ever say Bush isn't thinking ahead.
Meanwhile, the Senate has passed the same old energy bill it always passes -- a few bones tossed for those who think we should launch a Manhattan Project to develop alternative energy, a refusal to take the quickest and most effective steps (like insisting on modest increase in fuel efficiency for automobiles) and the insistence that energy plants use "more" renewable fuels to generate electricity. (Naturally the White House objects to that.) And they tossed in partial immunity for big businesses that are responsible for polluting our groundwater all over the country. The House bill is even worse.
And in possible good news for our children's children, 30 nations have come together to start building the world's first nuclear fusion reactor in France. Greenpeace, rather foolishly, objects, says the NYT.
Environmental campaign group Greenpeace estimates that if the project yields any results at all, it will not be until the second half of this century.``At a time when it is universally recognized that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project,'' it said.
It will take decades and may not even work, but it's exactly the sort of long-range thinking that has to take place if the world is to solve its hunger for energy. And working on a fusion reactor doesn't mean you can't also tackle greenhouse gases.
