Geothermal can heat your home in the winter and cool it in the summer and it doesn't pollute beaches.

Geothermal can provide electricity for your office building, and it doesn't destroy marine life.

Geothermal will not run your car, and it won't make plastic blister packs, so I guess that we still need to drill for oil.

For the same reason, geothermal will always be a "great idea but not workable" because geothermal and the tree huggers that support it don't have the money to buy the political backing, the kind of money that Exxon-Mobil makes in profit every quarter..

So geothermal will make small dents into the market, and California will require some level of its use, but this huge source of renewable energy will go largely untapped. You probably never heard of heating and cooling you home to 68 degrees, year around, with almost no moving parts. Ten years ago friends of mine from the US Department of Energy told me about it, and I was astounded.

At about 8' down depending on your climate the ground stays 68 degrees. It just stays that temperature. So what the folks from DOE told me is that you basically make a worm tube out of 12" duct, put it down 8' in the ground, and run a fan to push outside air through it and into the house. The air, passing through the metal ductwork takes on the temperature of 68 degrees, so when it comes into your house you get free heat in the winter and free air conditioning in the summer.

Another thing they told me about was running a big waterline at that 8' depth and running the waterline into your existing heat pump. That gives your heat pump a source to warm up in the winter that is 68 degree water instead of 32 (or lower) degree air, so it doesn't have to work hard to warm the air in your home.

From there they went on to buildings, and the technologies available with geothermal are amazing. You can run pipes into a well and come out with air conditioning. Have you every noticed those office buildings with a lake or big pond out front, usually with a fountain spraying? Geothermal! The pipes are in the lake!

They have HUGE projects going on with this!

Maybe this little oopsy spill (sounds minimal compared to "the greed-based holocaust perpetuated on the environment") can get a few more people interested in renewable energy sources like geothermal, solar, wind, and biomass. If enough of us took action, it would almost be worth it. Almost.

Renewable Energy and what we have learned from an accident on an oil platform:

We are an oil-based society. If we do not begin to use renewable energy in our everyday lives we will eventually, simply through competition for the oil needed to run our society, inflate the price to the point that we can no longer afford it. Look at the price of gasoline (petrol) in Europe. It's triple what we pay here. Eventually we can expect they supply of oil to diminish, and the places where the oil companies drill to become more invasive. And the price will be out of reach. Out of reach.

We know that the country is too dependent on oil. The amount of oil we use creates a need beyond what is easy to produce, so Shell, Exxon, BP, and all the other oil producing companies drill for oil where they can find it. They have to go places that we object to like the Alaskan slopes or Long Beach, CA. They drill out in the Gulf of Mexico, and offshore all over the world. They buy oil from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and all the rest of OPEC, because the world consumes oil at a phenomenal rate. We compete with every other country in the world for oil, so we pay whatever price the market will bear. As demand continues to go up, so does the price, and as the price goes up, so does profit and the need for new supply.

It seems fairly obvious that the demand for and profit from oil has led to a great amount of risk-taking on the part of oil companies. This has led to compromise in safety which has in turn led to accidents. According to news channels, there are accidents on oil rigs on a regular basis. The BP “spill” in the Gulf  may be far more disastrous than others, but it is nonetheless just another accident. Whether it is a small fire on an oil platform, or a total explosion is moot. It is an accident on an oil rig. They happen.

Drilling for oil that cannot be carefully controlled because of the depth in the ocean is a request for tragedy. Procedures to prevent disasters such as we have seen have been ignored because shut-off equipment was allowed to be left off of the well. Attempts to deal with this situation failed because major oil producers have not been required to ensure that they have the capability to fix an emergency like this. Why would they expect that a rig would never collapse or be destroyed by an explosion? It's just another accident on an oil platform. Why is there no disaster plan, or if there is, why isn't it enforced? Isn't that why we have regulations in the first place?

Can we tolerate this in the name of oil? I think not. I think not when I read, just as you have, that Exxon has Quarterly profits in the BILLIONS of dollars. I think not when I read that a major oil producer still has not paid for the damage caused by the largest oil spill in history, the Exxon Valdez. I think not when it comes to light that the amount of oil being vomit into the Gulf of Mexico by the nice folks at British Petroleum is far more than they had originally admit to, as though they expect us to believe that they couldn't tell us, to the gallon, how much oil they were taking from that well in a single day.

We as a country have to reduce our consumption of oil. We simply must. On a daily basis we hear about going green, saving energy, cutting back on consumption of fossil fuels and oil. It is time to start paying attention to renewable energy. We need to stop and think.

A decade ago we saw paper bags in the grocery store being phased out to save trees. The alternative was plastics bags made from oil. The power and light companies continue to run coal-fired plants. In 2008, Alabama imported 79 percent of the coal it used to generate electricity. To pay for those imports, Alabama sent $1.53 billion out of state, with the largest sums going to buy coal from Colombia and Wyoming.

Wind farms can produce that electricity for them, like the new one in West Texas that can singularly produce enough electricity to supply the energy needs of a town the size of Lincoln, Nebraska or Ft. Wayne, Indiana. This is renewable energy, not oil dependent. After first cost it is almost FREE!

Solar collectors can focus the sunlight into enormous batteries, enough to power manufacturing facilities, and we still rely on traditional electricity. Again, this is renewable energy and not oil dependent.

Ground Source, or Geothermal cooling and heating is being used in Minnesota and Nevada, proving that to be a cost effective and environmentally sound form of renewable energy. 600,000 Geothermal Heat Pumps are in operation. Every building sits on ground, and their entire electric needs could be supplied through that ground.

"Use of these technologies has been far too limited because we lack the simple and effective ways for people to access them," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Yes, we are an oil-based society. If we do not begin to use renewable energy in our everyday lives we will eventually, simply through competition for the oil needed to run our society, inflate the price to the point that we can no longer afford it. Look at the price of gasoline (petrol) in Europe. It's triple what we pay here. Eventually we can expect they supply of oil to diminish, and the places where the oil companies drill to become more invasive. And the price will be out of reach. Out of reach.