Update 5/18/2008
CNN recently did a report that possibly over 60% of the cost of a barrel of oil may be attributed to Wall Street speculators. Imagine oil at $50 a barrel or gas back at $2.00 per gallon. I am appalled that Wall Street millionaires are making huge profits, not only on fuel, but also on commodities like orange juice, grain, meat, etc., while causing working Americans to have to give up their Health Insurance and other basic necessities.
It is almost unimaginable that one group of Americans could do this to another, but this is the result of unregulated Wall Street greed and corruption. This is to important and cannot wait for me to get into the White House to fix. This needs to be fixed immediately, so contact your representatives in Congress, and demand that they regulate the speculators out of Wall Street. Click this link to contact Congress.
Furthermore, to get some of this money back to the working people that originally earned it, I would imposed a 100% tax on income from Wall Street speculation and I would not allow them to deduct money loss in speculation. Immediate and strong steps are needed to save America.
Today I saw diesel fuel at $4.59. I'm not going into all the other excuses (the war, Katrina, higher costs, etc.), the excessive profits to the oil companies, or try to guess how much fossil fuel we had left. I'm just going to says we need to greatly increase our conversion to electrical energy.
In the United States we had three free, continuous natural sources of electricity. They are wind, sunlight, and moving water.
I would like to see a 500 hp electric engine that would be the approximate size and weight as the diesel engine in my semi and battery storage for at least 14 hours of operation that would be approximately the size of my two 140 gallon fuel tanks. This system would need to be able to recharge within 10 hours while still running a heater/air conditioner and a few minor electrical accessories.
While some may say this is unreasonable, look back 50 years to the diesel truck industry. In the 1950's and 60's a truck was lucky to be going just a few miles per hour pulling their loads up the mountains in California, Colorado, etc. Now we can pull 80,000 pounds up these same mountains at over 70 mph.
To reach this goal, we need to build a lot of wind generators and solar panels in a hurry. People often complain about the wind generators and solar panels ruining their view of some landscape, so my recommendation is to put them on a grid system in the median of our interstate system. Additional advantages of putting them here is the government already owns the land and vehicles can recharge while parked in the rest areas. People also ask about vehicles running into them. We would simply put barricades along the highway to protect them.
How do we get this cheaply and efficiently?
First have NASA design wind generators and solar panels that can be mass produced on an assembly line process. Then have inmates do the assembling and the installation. Inmates often have trouble finding good paying jobs when they get out of prison so they return to crime. Since they built and installed these while in prison, they would have the skills to get good paying jobs maintaining them when they get out.