Oil economics are blowing us to wind and sun energy

Bob Dylan said it best: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” While politicians and environmentalists have been busy arguing about how best to require that greenhouse gases be curtailed, the world around them has changed. The precipitous rise in oil and gas prices over the past year has made the debate on greenhouse gas emissions moot. The reduction in the output of those gases will move forward at warp speed, not because of rules, regulations and cap-and-trade decrees but because of free markets and economics.

Two factors are driving this sea change. First, the price of our traditional fuels

How have we come to this point? Blame it on oil prices and technology. The extraordinary increase in the price of hydrocarbons and coal has created a price umbrella under which competing technologies can flourish. Already, clean wind energy is increasing by leaps and bounds. In the past five years, more than 5 gigawatts of wind turbine capacity has been built in Texas alone; on days when the winds whistle along the plains, wind energy represents just under 10 percent of the electrical supply in the Lone Star State.

Houston Chronicle