Electricity

The United States has been blessed with readily available electric power for the last 50 years, at least. This - to me - is one of the great accomplishments of the United States (as well as other 1st world countries). One of my objections to the alternative power sources suggested to combate climtae change (wind and solar - but especially wind) has been their unreliability. Society must either do without power when conditions are not right for production (clouds or no wind) or maintain a second complete power system to "pick up the slack" in those conditions. Here is an intersting little aritcle form a British newspaper where the head of British Power basically says that people will just have to do without (http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Doc3.pdf).

But isn't htat a failure of government? To develop a society based upon accessable electric power, and then to limit it strikes me as a socially unviable model. And in a Democratic system, it seems unlikely that political parites that suppoet such a position will survive.