Should the U.S. government should provide incentives for alternative fuels?

Question

Why? Why not?

Answer 1

Depends.

Alternative fuel does NOT equal good alternative fuel contrary to what many politicians convey.

Take electric cars for example. Great idea. No emissions right? WRONG. 70% of your energy comes from smog producing coal plants.

Ethanol. Great idea again. But this time you burn more diesel creating the fuel then you get out of it. The only reason the project is even feasible is government subsidies. Not to mention is raises the cost of corn, and food in general because it takes up crop land.

Wind. Plausible idea-- but unfortunately produces too little energy, extremely unsightly and expensive. My girlfriend worked for an investment bank in Germany-- a power company over there, a client of her bank, almost went out of business because there wasn't very much wind that year. Can't imagine if Germany was actually dependent on those wind turbines...

Hybrid-- Like it! The government has incentives already. More efficient cars are great.

Hydropower. Destructive to the environment.

Clean coal - I know it doesn't truly 'exist'-- but that's saying you should go for the super size if your going to get fries. Let's clean it up as much as possible until we come up with something better.

Biomass/woodchip -- Great idea except it creates a lot of pollution and is completely impractical-- no way to power the planet on it (if you want to still have rain forest in 10 years) In Europe they are building the world's largest woodchip plant. Unfortunately it turns out more energy will be used to transport the wood to the plant than it will produce-- and that's diesel my friends.

Nuclear - combine nuclear power plants with electric cars, we have a way to eliminate the energy crisis once and for all. Fear of nuclear power is both irrational and ignorant. Its safe, clean, and reliable. Don't start spouting of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island as you most likely don't know the first thing about them. I have done extensive research on both, and Three Mile Island was actually a demonstration of how safe nuclear power really is. While Chernobyl, an example of why we should stop letting Iran, etc try to go nuclear... U.S. plants are run in such a way, that catastrophic failure is almost impossible.

All the while, we should work on developing efficient solar, and some clean syngas technology that will be able to use coal, oil, or even garbage as its source.

Incentives are great if they aren't foolishly thrown around in favor of idealistic yet illogical projects.

Answer 2

Actually they do.  The "tax breaks" that liberals complain about for "big oil" can only be used if they invest a large percentage of their profits into research of alternative energies and fuels.

Answer 3

Incentives ar offerd but you have to know where to look to get them.  It is like all things where the hard par is finding out what you can get.

rd

Answer 4

absolutley. our country NEEDS to become energy independent.  We cannot rely on these muslim dogs to buy our oil from. it would incourage people to throw away their hummers and get cars that save the environment and our wallets.

Answer 5

Yes, because it worked well the first time they did it back in the early to mid 70"s when the oil embargo's happened, many people ( including some of my family members ) installed solar panels for heat and hot water, but when they needed to be replaced and there were no incentives they didn't reinstall the panels they just took them down and left it at that, a decision I very much disagreed with.