Messrs Marolda and Grady are right, in my opinion, to question the economics and the physics, respectively, of the solar power issue. [Letters, Sept. 17] As a small business owner I am acutely sensitive to the ROI of such an investment, and as an engineer I am skeptical of the viability of generating electricity with polycrystalline solar cells in their present form.
Yet, as the director of Research and Development and new product development in our company, I have to ask the following two questions: why are we subsidizing fossil fuels? The answer is because they are becoming increasingly expensive to extract. There is 100 percent agreement among scientists and engineers that we will run out of oil sometime in the next 50 to 70 years. So a truly free market approach would be, build the Hummers, high-performance and muscle cars. There will be people to buy them, and if it pushes the price of oil up, so be it. It just brings us to the end game more quickly.
That brings the second question: why should we subsidize the purchases of those people who want to use a limited resource as quickly as they would like? I hope you pause to think about this.
About 70 percent of oil is used for transportation. The other 30 percent is used for over 6,000 products that most of us would consider essential. (Data thanks to Reverend Wendy Bell.) We have an enormous amount of work to do, replacing the petrochemical ingredient in all these other nontransportation-related products. That work, if properly managed, would result in jobs—lots of jobs. It starts with a dispassionate (read, nonpolitical) assessment of our situation and a coordinated effort to see past the passing of oil and the emergence of a new nonoil era.
Jim Phelan
Poor Farm Road
