No. Brian Keane is wrong. Obama is asleep at the wheel on energy. We need a policy to retire ALL FORMS OF CARBON FUELS as soon as possible. There are four states burning today, one or two of them setting new records, spewing Carbon-Dioxide gas as a burn product, which is part of the self-acceleration mechanism of Global Warming. Climate change dehydrates continental interiors, which dessicates interior air, which contributes to wildfires, which adds to the speed of Global Warming.
Methane gas (Natural Gas) is not cleaner, as unburned molecules regularly go out the flue. Each molecule of methane in the upper atmosphere destroys ozone thereby producing 25 times the global warming effect of one molecule of CO2. All the methane which does burn becomes CO2.
We have seven times more fossil fuels needed to kill the Earth. We are not running out of fuels -- we are running out of environment which supports higher life.
The rooftops of American homes (100 million family residences x 2000 sq.ft. average floorplan) is 10% more than enough space to generate all the electrical production required presently to power the national grid. This is assuming low-efficiency 12 watts per sq.ft. polysilicon cheap photovoltaic panels with zero technical breakthroughs required.
A smartgrid with plug-in BEV vehicles (like the Chevy Volt) will store 4 times the daily PV production, buying and selling electrons than is needed daily by America by the power grid. Hydrogen fuel cells of a 60 kW car will power 60 homes for every hour that it has fuel.
Moving electrons is expensive -- it costs $1 megabuck per mile for transmission lines for the power grid, but trucks can move PV silicon wafers from the windfields in the Dakotas to where the power is needed very economically. Turning wind into PV silicon makes more sense than pumping electrons. There's no shortage of wind or PV in that scenario, and no shortage of storage with 100,000,000 American cars and light trucks storing 20 kW each.
A scientifically literate president would know all this, as would a scientifically literate Brian Keane. Go get a education before telling America to keep addicted to the fossil-fuel-heroin.
