Hello,
That's what I thought (about DC transmission), too. But apparently, we are both wrong. The Scientific American proposal is the first place that I heard this -- but it has been confirmed by several other credible sources. We live and learn, right?
You are forgetting that we had a
surplus when GWB took office -- they then fought over how to "spend" it.
The Iraq War is costing us ~10 Billion dollars per month, or about
200 Million per day -- and that may be just for the military. We are borrowing that money, so the interest over time will easily put the cost well over 1 Trillion dollars.
If we were to spend just a fraction of that money on energy independence, as Al Gore is proposing, not only would we not need to fight in Iraq, we would stop spending
$2,600,000,000 PER DAY on oil. (Based on 20 million barrels / day @ $130 / barrel).
ALL of that money goes to the oil companies and to the countries where we buy it!
Add to this that we can stop mining coal, and we can use natural gas for heating (and to run some vehicles?) -- the positives add up pretty quickly.
If we spend the money on building the solar, wind, and grid infrastructure -- we employ a lot of Americans -- and the only cost for our electricity would be for maintenance. The energy itself would be "free".
We improve our security.
We improve our economy.
We improve our environment.
Why would we not do this?