Watson A.Name "Watt Sun - the Dark Remover" wrote:
Last nite (Tue, 9pm) I watched a prog on PBS that was about getting
people to use more renewable resources, hosted by Cameron Diaz (hot
blonde movie star), who drives a Prius.

Nice idea, although in her particular case I'd be willing to bet that she
could be driving a Hummer and it'd be a small drop in the amount of energy
she uses for transportation! (Due to all those jet rides...)

They talked about getting every
home to have a solar panel, and selling power back to the utility co.

I'm all for net metering (power company has to pay you the same for a
kilowatt-hour as what you would have had to pay to buy it from them), and
happily it is becoming more common in the U.S. Panels and controllers are
continuing to get cheaper as well. Additional government support could
really help improve how many people would seriously consider sticking
photovolataic panels on their roofs -- I imagine right now it's well under
1% of the population.

She also said that if everyone in the U.S. drove a hybrid vehicle, we
could completely eliminate oil shipments from the middle east.

We could do that as-is... there's plenty of oil in Alaska, after all, we've
just made the choice that protecting the environment up there is more
important right now than not importing oil from the middle east. (This is a
very involved topic -- if anything, the choice of where we get our oil from
is far more political than technical in nature anyway.)

---Joel Kolstad