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The Case for Coal

It's quite a conundrum. America spent around $475 billion for foreign oil in 2008 (2009 numbers are not complete yet, although the total is certainly projected to be lower). It's clear that electric powered battery technology for cars would allow us to keep more U.S. dollars at home, improve the trade deficit and provide manufacturing and other jobs, too.

We have enough sunlight, wind, natural gas, and coal to generate the power it would take to transition to domestically supported power generation. The long-term benefits are obvious. Wind and solar installations have an upfront cost, but pay for themselves over time. Natural gas and even coal are domestic resources that can and should be leveraged to allow us to be more energy independent.

But getting to the point of energy independence is a difficult path.

It's easy to look at that $475 billion figure and say if we invested that into the power generation economy, we'd have efficient battery technology for electric cars and plenty of new manufacturing jobs.