10 years? "Carbon Neutral"? Not possible in any real sense. In an immediate sense, there's simply too much infrastructure built around the use of oil.
I do find it amusing that Al Gore's "plan" is... well... not a plan at all, so much as a series of utterly empty suggestions.
So.
Renewable energy. The problems with renewable energy sources are various. Pretty much all of the classic "renewable" sources are limited by location, output, and believe it or not, possible environmental repercussions. The last one is mostly the province of hydro power, but even wind and solar can have effects on the surrounding area. I recall a large number of animal rights activists fighting wind farms on the basis that they can kill migrating birds, and solar farms on the basis that they can utterly destroy local ecologies by simply placing a few square miles of mirrors/panels over top of it.
Now, there are options beyond those three that qualify as renewable energy. One in particular stands out as a definite solution to the problem, provided we're willing to deal with the repercussions of the
solution.
Breeder Reactors.
Yes, they generate nuclear waste. Not much relative to the current generation of light water reactors though, and their fuel requirements are functionally nonexistent. Yes, they produce weapons-grade fissile material. So what? We can use that in reactors too.
Nuclear reactors have no limitations regarding output or location; you can build them anywhere and their output is measured in thousands of megawatts. (Needs more jiggawatts!) Their biggest problem is one of public perception, mostly brought about by the anti-nuclear energy lobby. Coal fired reactors, on a per-watt basis, produce roughly
ONE THOUSAND times the released radiation as nuclear power.
Further proof that hippies are holding back the progress of the United States.
So, assuming we make the shift to a nuclear economy for our power generation needs, where does that leave us in terms of everything else?
The answer is: Still totally boned. Most American cities aren't really designed around pedestrian traffic, and our mass-transit systems are inadequate to cope with a huge additional influx of passengers. Fixing that problem would cost more money than most people realize, I expect, and it's just a minor footnote in the grand scheme of "screwed" that stands in the way of a carbon-neutral US.
How do products move from one side of the country to the other? By use of burning fossil fuels. Planes, trains, ships and trucks, all burn fossil fuels to move. Now, we can eliminate three of those, but for two of them the cost of doing so is again something that people aren't going to want to hear. Yep, that's right. Nuclear ships and trains. It'd be mostly the long-haulers, but yes, you can engineer a nuclear reactor down to fit into a train. Of course, it'd pretty much have to be a
pebble bed reactor, but with all the plutonium we're generating in our new hypothetical nuclear economy, fueling them shouldn't be too much of an issue, and reinforcing the reactor vessel should limit the level of any potential disaster.
At some point we're going to have to get over this exaggerated, hysterical fear of nuclear power.
Now, sufficient research into battery technology for electric cars/trucks, and we'd be well on our way to being as "carbon neutral" as can be expected.
But it would cost more money than most people can imagine. We'd have to basically abandon all our extra-national military adventures, slash budgets to the bone, and quite possibly cripple our economy horribly in the short term, with long-term repercussions that could force the US out of its preeminent world position.
