Renewable energy is belived too expensive right now in part because petroleum is considered so much more inexpensive (a debatable point when we add the price of two wars in the past decade to protect our oil interest in those two regions).
However, as the price of petroleum goes up because of scarcity, it will just become even more expensive to use petroleum to develop non renewable energy, meaning we never reach the point where non renewable energy can create more non-renewable energy.
There is a threshold point with renewable energy where if enough renewable's already exist, then more renewable’s can be created primarily from existing renewable energy sources. We are nowhere near that point, and as the price of petroleum goes up because of scarcity, we will never get to a point where alternative energy is "affordable" since most people will not stand for petroleum that could have gone into their car's tank going for research and development of more efficient renewable energy technology.
Petroleum would better serve the planet as a transitional energy source that allows for an infrastructure of renewable energy to be created so that less coal, nuclear and petroleum are necessary to meet our energy needs.
Mitt Romney's belief that alternative energy should be affordably competitive first, is opportunistically ridiculous. Petroleum was not affordably competitive at first. Petroleum only became affordable once there was a generated need for petroleum, such as assembly lines that created lower cost cars. Even then, it was the creation of the federal reserve right around the same time as petroleum was being harnessed.
Those cars coming off the first assembly line were purchased with LOANS. According to Romney's philosophy, those cars should never have been created since it took the Federal Reserve butting in with "loans" to help create additional demand for petroleum that then allowed for investment in petroleum to be justified.
Hey, maybe Romney is an environmentalist after all! Better still, if it takes government intervention to accelerate alternative energy growth, the payback in saved military actions will more than make up for the initial costs.
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