Solar Energy vs Drill, Baby, Drill!

Thomas Edison

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy--sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Thomas Edison expressed this sentiment in 1931. Eighty-one years later the Republican Party's bumper-sticker energy policy pander is still "Drill, Baby, Drill!" Panderbear thinks he'll stick with the certifiable genius on this issue rather a political party bought and paid for by the oil and coal industries.

A good start toward following Edison's advice would be to stop corporate welfare in the form of multi-billion dollar tax subsidies given to Big Oil, whose eventual death is as sure as the world's reserve of fossil fuels is finite.

Spending those billions on solar energy research would soon make it a cheaper and far cleaner source of energy than oil, gas, or coal. If we fail to make these investments then our national energy security dependence will some day shift from the middle east to China, which is currently cleaning our solar energy clocks.

Those who argue that we can drill our way out of our energy problems aren't just wrong today. They were wrong eight decades ago.

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