Catastrophic fuel shortages and catastrophic global climate change, helped along by Bush/Cheney. We are in for a major energy crisis very soon. Say goodbye to plastics, clothing, pharmaceuticals, suburbs, and your car. Meanwhile, the hydrogen economy is a long way off. Michael Klare, a prof at Hampshire College writes:
With oil demand regularly outpacing supply and disorder spreading in major producing areas, global shortages and resulting high prices are likely to become the norm, not the exception. Ideally, the United States could compensate for any shortfalls in the global availability of petroleum by increasing its reliance on other sources of energy. When producing electricity, for example, it is often possible to switch from coal to natural gas and back again. But most of our petroleum supplies are used in transportation -- mainly to power cars, trucks, buses, and planes -- and, for this purpose, oil has no readily available substitutes. Indeed, we have so organized our economy and society around the availability of cheap and abundant petroleum that we are severely ill-equipped to deal with the sort of shortages and supply disruptions that are likely to become the norm in the years ahead.
It is here that the performance of the Bush administration should come in for close scrutiny. In response to the earlier energy crisis of 2001, the President appointed a National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, to analyze America's energy predicament and devise appropriate solutions. The NEPDG issued its final report, the National Energy Policy (also known as the Cheney Report), in May, 2001. How the group arrived at its final assessment is a matter of some speculation, as the administration has refused to make its deliberations public, but its conclusions are incontrovertible: rather than stress conservation and the rapid development of renewable energy sources, the report called for increased U.S. reliance on petroleum. And because domestic oil production is in an irreversible decline, any rise in American oil usage necessarily entails an increased reliance on imported petroleum.
In a crude attempt to mislead the public about the nature of our oil dependency, the Cheney Report called for increasing U.S. energy "independence" by exploiting the untapped oil reserves of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and other protected wilderness areas. But ANWR only possesses sufficient petroleum to provide this country with (at most) 1 million barrels per day for an estimated 15-20 years, a tiny fraction of the 20 million barrels of additional oil that will be needed to supplement domestic output in 2025. What this suggests is that the overwhelming bulk of this additional energy will have to be acquired from foreign sources. To obtain all this imported energy, the Cheney Report calls on the President and his chief associates to place a high priority on acquiring additional petroleum from producers in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, Africa, and Latin America -- that is, from regions especially susceptible to instability and anti-Americanisim.
As a result, we are more dependent on foreign oil in 2004 than we were in 2001, and all the indicators suggest that this dependency will only become more pronounced during Bush's second term.
http://tomdispatch.com/
Klare does not mention a practical alternative, but I will. It has been found by the European Union to be the cleanest and lowest risk form of energy production, and recent breakthroughs have shown it could be used to produce synthetic fuel for the US transportation system: nuclear power.
It's the only large-scale, environmentally friendly way to generate hydrogen as well.
Nuclear energy in the US and Western Europe have resulted in zero deaths in the 50 years it has been used. The reactor design used at Chernobyl is an old, dangerous one and Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel which would have prevented the dispersal of radioactive material.
At present, spent nuclear fuel has been safely and securely stored for fifty years at the US plants where it is used. Plans for permanently isolating nuclear waste from the biosphere have been extensively researched. The National Academy of Sciences recommends sealing it in deep geological repositories. The volume of waste put out by the nearly 450 reactors in the world in one year: 3,000 cubic feet--tiny in comparison to what one coal-fired plant puts into the environment, every body of water, and your lungs. Unless more nuclear plants are built, energy needs will be supplied by increased burning of coal. Number of premature deaths in the US from coal combustion today: 32,000. Now that Bush has let coal companies set the emissions standards (the Orwellian Clean Skies), that number will be increasing.
Nuclear energy has already prevented billions of tons of carbon and other pollutants from going into the environment.