John McCain wants to increase our domestic supply of oil, fund electric car research, and build 40 new nuke plants to generate clean, low cost electricity.

1. As has been said at least a million times here on the Frays, developing more oil wells here in the US will take at least ten yeaers and we do not currently have the refining capability at present to handle it. McCain would be 82, should he live that long, before the first drop of new US oil produciton would come on line. Waste of breath talking about it as a fix to today's problems and the environmental horrors of offshore drilling never get mentioned by the oil comapnies or their lackeys in the Republican Party.

2. McCain has proposed a 300 million dollar prize for a significantly better battery system than is available now. That's a great idea, but a lot of research has already gone into batteries, especially by the military anxious to power not cars but tiny flying and crawling devices that can gather intelligence in the field. I did some work on this myself - specifically, I was told by a consultant to the Pentagon that if I could come up with a powerful, very light weight battery, I could write myself a check for maybe a 100 million dollars. I, of course, did not have the technical expertise to do any such thing, but I said I thought improvements in battery life and power would be at best linear, not geometric. I suggested instead that the little devices be "taught" to seek light or heat sources in order to repower themselves in the field.

3. Nuclear power plants come with a large assortment of problems even if we can be assured of no future Three Mile Islands or Chernobyls. Disposal of spent nuclear fuel is a huge problem that is not going away. Simply burying it underground is not sufficient.

4. McCain says nothing of renewable energy sources, nothing ot cleaning up emissions from coal powered plants, nothing of the boondoggle thaqt is ethanol. To be fair, Obama has also supported ethanol, as Illinois is a corn producing and ethanol processing state.