Obama's Toughest Challenge: America's Energy Crunch Comes Home

A brief assessment of future options for the supply of energy in the United States demonstrates that President Obama will face an extraordinary challenge in attempting to overcome the nation's long-term energy crisis. His natural inclination has been to make a series of modest gestures toward 'green energy independence'. But these have been wholly insufficient. In order to meet the energy crisis, a White House-led initiative on the scale of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb is needed. Its principal goals should be to drastically reduce the contribution of oil and coal to energy supply in the United States, increase the contribution of renewable energy and demilitarize the reliance on imported oil.