Why Alternative Energy, Part Two
April 30, 2012 | By Mike Gonet | Filed under: Articles, Education, Green News, Solar Energy, Wind Energy
Sometime between 2008 and 2009, or perhaps before then, I got it in my head that the best poetry was political in nature, the best fiction was psychological or sociological in nature, and the best non-fiction, well, was non-fiction!
It was also sometime around then that I got on board the alternative energy train, or rather hopped on the caboose that was being dragged by the engine. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about writing about the subject. I was only interested in understanding why the drumbeat of news on the subject was getting louder. I convinced myself of the benefits of alternative energy not for the reasons I mentioned in an earlier blog post, “Why Alternative Energy.”
Back then, I could only see the subject from an international economist’s point of view. Economic policymakers typically argue that the US current account deficit, the fact that the nation imports more than it exports, is sustainable because it has a large internal market. If it had to, the country could enjoy life without exporting or importing. But it seemed clear to me that America needed to prove to itself as a nation that it didn’t have a balance of payments issue, that our current account deficit was sustainable, or else not on a one-way track to nowhere, and that changing our energy mix would go a long way towards that.
