The world has been running off of fossil fuels for over 100 years. The addiction we have to oil can be seen in our daily lives as we import millions of barrels of oil a year in the US with no end in site.

Are there any solutions to our ever growing dependence on foreign oil? Couldn’t we just drill more here? Is alternative energy the only solution?

I just watched a speech by Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce where he spoke of about the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce, that would make everyone satisfied. The basic conclusion that he revealed is that there is no single sauce that would please everyone, but that you must produce a couple different variants of the same sauce (spicy, chunky, original) to satisfy the majority of the people. This was groundbreaking when the research came out because for decades, the food industry had a single solution that they believed would satisfy the most people and since they were content with their sales, they didn’t bother to test new recipes and didn’t innovate.

I’ve been thinking about this same concept in regards to the energy industry and how it can be applied. The basic thinking in energy is that oil is the way to go. It’s what we’ve been doing for the past 100 years and it’s what will keep us going in the future, so don’t waste any time with alternative energy, we just need to find more oil.

On the flip side, the people that are against traditional energy say that alternative energy is the only way to go, it’s what will get us off our addiction of foreign oil.

Both sides of these arguments are narrow minded. Neither of them look for solutions on the other side, or a way to intertwine them both.

So what’s the solution?

I’m going to dig a little deeper into this topic, but for now I just want to leave you with a thought. If technology was developed for automobiles to get 200 miles per gallon, would we want to spend our money and time in research and development of electric cars?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.