With regards to the wind/solar etc, be careful to not cherry pick info to much. Yes solar panels are cheap, and yes they are more efficient than ever, and yes they can be woven into fabric. But generally each of those properties is mutually exclusive. The high efficiency panels are still expensive, and rigid. the cheap ones aren't as efficient, and the woven ones are still expensive as they still haven't sorted the technology out. Not to mention that weather patterns can still effect them. major major issue that needs to be solved with solar.
Ontop of this, you have issues of subsidies, base load, old plants (eg, if you have a power plant, and then install half of its capacity worth of solar panels... then you have to run that plant at 50% capacity, which is generally less efficient than running it at 100% capacity. aswell as that you can't dismantle it as you might need to run it upto 100% again for weather issues), beauty issues, (there's a dam good reason why they don't allow wind turbines on blocks less than 5 acres), chicken and egg situations (Sure, building a solar plant in the desert might be good, but there's no transmission lines, noone will build then unless there's a really good case for them, but until someone builds the plant there isn't the case, etc. More of an issue with new emerging technologies such as hot rock geothermal), the fact that combined cycle natural gas plants produce half the emissions than coal, the issue of providing transportation (I honestly can't see non hydrocarbon based fuels working for that in the mid term) and many other issues.
To tie this back into the debate at hand... as we still have veritable crap loads of coal and gas left (enough for at least the next 50 years, probably more), and that it is comparatively cheap compared to practically any other option, why don't we stick with that to save people money? keep investing in other technologies, allow them to mature even more before we more heavily build into them!
(I could be slightly biased due to the much larger amount of resources in this country, though as far as i'm aware the US still wouldn't need to rely on foreign imports to run on coal and gas for their power industry)
Also: i'd like to see some info on this 1500 buck turbine that could provide the required power.
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Topic: Occupying Wallstreet (Read 296210 times)