When I looked at Gail's first paragraph, I thought of a South African farmer calling her pet Ostriches home.

"It gets depressing hearing about our financial problems every day. I am sure a lot of people would rather talk about oil and natural gas, and about better prospects for the future. Improved technology is one factor that might make future production better than the bleak future that most of us are foreseeing today. It might even reduce costs, so that more oil and gas can be produced at the lower prices we are seeing today."

Just to be clear, producing more oil & gas at current lower prices
is anathema to the paramount requirement of discouraging fossil fuel dependence.

To put this in context, global food security is threatened by climate destabilization in a way that PO cannot achieve ;
it threatens the viability even of basic crops even by traditional subsistence farming methods -
without a stable climate, those methods do not function year-on-year.

How much of this Ostrich-tendency to actively ignore the potent climate threat
is actually based on the expectation that it's only the usual black African children who will suffer
(i.e. die slowly of starvation or of the ailments of impoverishment)
is very hard to fathom.

Suffice to say, if the expectation were of white American children dying slowly of starvation
as an exponentially destabilizing climate causes successive global crop failures,
or if the expectation were of the US facing national crop failures after such impoverishment that it can no longer fund food imports,
if either of those was the underlying expectation,
then I rather doubt that comments here would refer so easily to the prospects for advancing fossil fuels' production,
when what is needed, in the name of simple humanity, is their very rapid disavowal.

So is it now time that TOD's contributors sort out just which children we are going to care about, and how much ?

Regards,

Backstop
[farmer, forester & observer]

Developing the largest non-polluting, renewable energy source of electricity in the U.S. is a bad thing?

The problem with the Ogallala aquifer depletion would remain without the Pickens Plan. You only have to look to the Colorado river to see the future of the Ogallala.