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Lets Put Some Money Up
by James Glaser June 10, 2008 We have had a bounty out on Osama bin Laden for seven years now, and nobody has claimed it. I think Washington raised the amount to 50 million dollars, but still no one has come forward with Osama in chains or over the back of a pack mule. Even with that kind of money you are not going to be able protect your family. The bounty idea was a good one, but not for this century, nor for people in the Middle East who know a blood feud can go on for centuries. There is something we could put a bounty on that just might work. Let's put up a hundred million, no, let's make it an even billion, to the person or company that can come up with an alternative to our dependency on foreign oil. With that kind of pay-off, a person could risk a lot of money on research. George Bush was on television yesterday talking about how we are addicted to carbon based fuels, and we have to work on that. Well, it is nice George has figured out that we have this problem, but it is now 7 ½ years into his 8 years in office, and time has run out for any Bush plan to work. But if Congress would put up, let us call it a prize of a billion dollars, in the next eight years we might just see some progress in getting us away from our addiction to oil. For years I have heard that oil companies buy up any new product that might cut into their gas sales, but I don't know if that is true. What is true is that a few years ago, General motors had an extremely successful electric car. What happened to it? GM took every one of them and destroyed them. They even made a movie about it titled "Who Killed the Electric Car."
So, maybe those stories about the oil companies buying up new technology might be true, and if you look at oil company profit's a prize of one billion might not be enough. Any way you look at it though, we have to get American ingenuity working on this problem and just maybe a big bounty will do the trick. |
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