Thanksgiving is still forthcoming...

The alternative energy question is a complicated and convoluted one. Nothing seems to fit quite right, and each alterative has a whole list of caveats on which some people may not be willing to compromise. Let’s break it down. Obviously, oil and coal suck. Moving on.

Ethanol. Ethanol is cleaner-burning, yes. But it’s made of food. Corn, to be exact. Corn from Mexico, to be even more exact. In this day and age, when stories of food shortages are plastered across newspapers in the developing world (and in Europe, where they seem more aware of such things), does it really make sense to be making car fuel out of food? They are experiencing shortages of corn in Mexico, so much so, that many people are now going without their traditional tortillas because they have nothing with which to make them. Corn farmers make more money selling corn to fuel companies than to locals who need to eat.

Next, wind power. Seems like a great idea, especially once you get past the immense oil investments it takes to make the turbines in the first place. From then on, the power is green and clean. Problems arise, however, in the set-up. What better place to put fields of wind turbines than in real fields? Say, in Kansas or something. Sounds great, until you take into account the fact that those turbines are being placed in prime whooping crane nesting grounds. The population of those and similar birds since the advent of those imposing, modern windmills is staggering. They have nowhere to nest. Not to mention the fact that bats are dying in boatloads because the turbine suction destroys their ability to navigate in the dark, causing fatal crashes. Is it really fair to ask these aviators to give up their lives so we can watch the big game in HD?

Let’s move on to solar power. Pretty clean, especially since we plan on keeping the sun around for quite a while. However, the metals required to make them are relatively rare and non-renewable. Also, the mining investments are substantial, involving both oil-driven machinery and invasive mining procedures that damage habitats, watersheds, and numerous other cultural and natural resources. The manufacturing of the panels, too, is a huge draw on oil and coal resources, requiring intensive industrial input, though it is (hopefully) a one-time investment. That’s assuming they never break. While use is low, the impact of mining and manufacture is minimal; but should all 6 billion people (or even just 100 million of them) up and decide they want solar panels of their very own, the impact on the environment would be devastating.

Hydrogen might also seem like a fun solution to the gas problem, though you would have to be able to deal with the fear that one inopportune bump from another car will send you up in a brilliant ball of fire.

Nuclear is another choice, a popular one in Europe, where reactors line the Rhine. It’s clean burning and fairly efficient, though mining burdens are notable, and there’s always the question of what in the world you’re going to do with the waste. There was a long-standing solution that we could just dump it in Africa, but apparently, people actually live there (who knew?). Some guy in England claims that he’s created a way of balling the waste up and exposing the outside to extreme amounts of energy to solidify it into a shatter-and-leak-proof glass coating with a shelf-life of 200,000 years, effectively encasing the waste until it is no longer dangerous. The European Community has been working non-stop to find a means of disposing or reusing the waste, so I think it would be safe to assume that eventually, they’ll find something. But until there, there’s always the danger that we’ll all starting growing third arms. Which, you know, may come in handy.

Natural gas has also been tossed about. Many buses in cities have converted to the substance, which, while slightly more clean-burning than oil, is not necessarily more efficient or cheaper; there’s also that pesky little “non-renewable” label that goes with it, implying that like coal and oil, the mining (digging? I don’t know what the correct term for gas extraction would be) of it is environmentally unsustainable (I’m not gonna lie, there’s no way to mine anything in an environmentally-friendly way, those who say there is are lying) and it will run out. Which is what we’re trying to avoid in the first place.

Don’t even get me started on “clean coal” or some such nonsense… that’s just West Virginia’s way of pretending to be economically important so the rest of us don’t forget they’re actually a state.

Please feel free to add suggestions! Maybe we can solve the world’s problems…