Alternative energy needs to be renewable and sustainable.
Unfortunately, understanding alternative energy isn't simple. Lots of distinctions need to be made and unfortunately, the general public, the media and the gov. don't seem to be up to those distinctions - or have other agendas driving them. Biofuels are my favorite example. They aren't renewable or sustainable and will compete with food crops. Four major mass balance studies all concluded for biofuels (including algae biofuels) will require substantial amounts of NPK fertilizers (same as foods) to produce even minimal amounts of energy. NPK production is dependent on petroleum and no one seems to get that. Or, they say we can develop biofuels on wastes, but the studies that looked at using wastes for biofuels say that wastes could provide a maximum of about 3% of our energy needs with biofuels, or looking at differently only offset about 1.5% of the peak phosphates in that we currently use for food crops. Other experts are saying that a global biofuel industry would quadruple our NPK use and this in a time when both petroleum and phosphates are considered peak commodities. It gets worse - according to the 2011 USDA Fertilizer Import Summary the US imports over half of it's fertilizers - with 15% of our phosphates coming from Morocco. Now consider the demand that biofuels would put on our NPK consumption, not only will we have dramatically increases in food costs, but we will then not only be dependent on foreign sources for our energy - but our foods as well. How's that for a military and political strategy to reduce foreign resource dependence? Alternative energies need to be sustainable. Biofuels aren't - wind, solar, and tidal are and they don't compete with our foods supply or dramatically change our economic paradigms regarding our food economics.
