Oil: Irreplaceable?
In this article whose original title is “The price is wrong”, the author explains to us why renewable energies, in spite of their success growing year by year in our society, are not yet rather competitive compared to oil, and this is the same with the rise in the price of the barrel. Only radical political decisions can change the things.
Indeed, the electrical current produced by photovoltaic solar energy, for example, is five times more expensive than that produced by fossil energies. The wind power, is more attractive but remains very limited and is not aesthetic enough for the environment. As for the nuclear energy, the analysts have shown, because of waste, it was more expensive to close a power station than to build a new one. One also speaks about hybrid cars and houses, but that remains still vague. More especially as the fight continues, because the spark-ignition engines also evolve, in particular with the diesel engine which is almost as effective as the hybrid engine.
The subsidies and stimulations granted to renewable energies have failed these last twenty years in developed countries, for example Germany. Americans pay, expressed in percentage, twice less fuel taxes than Japanese, and even less than Western Europeans. To privilege renewable energies at the moment in the USA, would mean to attack the world of life of Americans what would be suicidal for the career of a politician who would start such steps, and in Europe that would be equivalent to emptying the cases of the governments, because the taxation of oil represents the third or the quarter of their incomes.
The author proposes a certain number of solutions, effective according to him, but like nature to us it taught so well: “there is a great difference between knowing the way and surveying the way”.