Beyond Petroleum? Not Anymore

It seems that British Petroleum's quest to go "beyond petroleum", is being vastly scaled back due to the impracticality of it all. It's not that they haven't tried. They've beaten their brains out trying to develop solar, they've tried the wind thing. And what have they discovered: Shazam! They don't work, they aren't competitve according the Tony Hayward, BP's CEO:

"I think solar is probably the most challenged of all of BP's alternative energy interests. It is not going to make the transition to be competitive with more conventional power -- the gap is too big. If solar is going to make a breakthrough, there will be a technology disintermediation step.

Well let's see .... How long have we been trying the solar thing? Literally decades. How many times do you see those crappy old solar panels taking up space on the roof of someone's house that have been there since the 80s and don't work anymore? They've been around since the 70s and poor saps just like you and I have been losing their asses on them ever since. They simply don't work well enough for people re-coup the investment in a reasonable period of time. So crappy old non-functioning solar panels sit on top of old houses. Don't tell me we haven't had time to develop the technology -- it just isn't competitive. Tony Hayward agrees and he should know because BP has put billions into "alternative energy" over the years (not to mention those cute commercials where they ask Americans, many of whom can't tell you why we celebrate Independence Day, what types of "alternative energy" BP should be exploring to go "beyond petroleum".)

It's not that BP is getting out of the "alternative fuels" business entirely. They are cutting back their spending by a third and closing their alternative energy center. Why? Because the "alternatives" the D.C. Politburo and Dear Leader Obama want to convert to in the next couple of decades aren't practical. Solar cars? It is to laugh. How many solar panels do you suppose it would take to move your Caddy down the road at 70 mph? And how's that wind turbine on the back of your minivan working out? Does anyone out there realize how vastly impractical all of those stupid wind farms are? Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asserted last April that we could replace all of the coal-fired power plants on the East Coast with wind power. FactCheck.org says that this is correct .... Except for the fact that it would take more than 3500 offshore wind farms as large as the most productive wind farm in the world -- 250,000 turbines in all. That's 250,000 more offshore wind turbines than we have now. And what happens when the wind isn't blowing?

In its scaling back of its "alternative energy" programs to refocus its efforts on oil and natural gas, BP is simply conceding the facts: Oil and gas are the fuel for the engine that drives the world economy and that isn't going to change anytime soon. Not only that, but it doesn't have to. We have hundreds of billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas there for the taking right now. But forget this: our Dear Leader is focused in "green jobs" and "green" technologies of the type that have sent Spain's economy into a tailspin. If the Obama Regime attempts to force this change, as they are doing right now with cap and tax, all of us will suffer for it in the form of skyrocketing prices for the tried and true energy sources -- oil, natural gas and coal, not to mention a worse economy and even higher unemployment. Hold on to your wallets folks. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.