Hurricanes, fusion and the future

Outside Tropical Storm/not quite hurricane Edouard is drenching my lawn. It's a soothing sound. And I expect it will be at it half the day and into the night.
I live far enough west of Houston - that the vicissitudes of the coastal weather usually don't bother my family, far enough to be cheap as well. Lucky me.
I've taken a new job this fall. I'll be teaching in the school district I live in. I suspect I'm not alone. Lots and lots of people have either changed jobs or contemplating changing jobs to find work closer to home, pushed by the rising cost of gas.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, which will probably piss some people off, but so be it. (I know how many people read this blog. I'm not stupid. Both of them can get in their SUV's and come throw dirt clods at my house if it will make them feel better.)
Guess what? Four dollar a gallon gasoline has proven in some ways to be a blessing. It's made lots of people park their honking pickups and suv's and find alternatives, if nothing else just to lessen the sting of paying a hundred dollars or more at the pump every week.
I own a ten year old Toyota Avalon; it gets about twenty miles to the gallon in the city if I'm not using the air conditioning.
Course, six months out of the year, I am using air conditioning. So it doesn't get anything like twenty to the gallon.
Lots of people are doing the same. I suspect that lots more people will be planting vegetable gardens next spring. They'll be looking for locally grown produce. They'll maybe shop at their neighborhood grocery instead of driving extra miles to the local GigantoWalmartotron.
People may look for kids clothes at their nearest garage sale, rather than at the nearest store.
They'll maybe buy a small car that gets 30+ miles to the gallon. Still can't figure out who exactly will buy those gigantic Ford 350's and GM Hummers. Perhaps someone will paint them and turn them into lawn art.
Our way of life is changing.
Change is hard. But change can be a good thing.
The end result is that we may take a look at ways out of all this, and quit arguing amongst ourselves. Take global warming - normal historical warming or warming caused by too much carbon dioxide in the air - either way, it's getting warmer, though so far by smallish amounts.
Those smallish amounts are causing things to happen - ice to melt and things to change - such that we can either place our heads further up our backsides or do something sensible about it.
Personally, I'd like to see us free from buying oil abroad. But unlike many, I think the worst thing we can do about it is simply to drill for more. If you are addicted to crack the way we are addicted to oil, a solution to same is not to just find a cheaper local dealer, or to start growing coca plants.
Some time in the next fifty years we need to give the oil economy the boot, and switch to the hydrogen economy. GM and Ford and Toyota are ready for it; they've already built their hydrogen cars. Ten years from now would be a whole lot better than fifty years from now.
The way to go in the meantime is not only more electricity-making fueled by clean moving air and moving water, but a host of things - not just drill more and use more clean coal and build more nuclear plants. We need to change laws to make electric cars legal - in most states they are not allowed. We need to regard nuclear plants as giant bulleyes for terrorists - and therefore to be avoided. We need to change laws to allow plants to turn their excess heat into electricity. We need to improve our pitiful mass transit system. We need to revamp our infrastructure. We need above all to quit doing what we were doing, just because we were doing it. We need to be daring. We need to think outside of the box.
What we really need is fusion - that is the nearly limitless power that fuels the atomic bomb.
Problem is that the power that fusion produces is so great we have yet to figure out how to contain it.
The Manhatten project that is spoken of to get us off our dependence on foreign oil should be started, but it's impetus should be to harness fusion.
To placate the oil corporations, whose money and influence are vast, we should invite them all in, and spend the next eight years in a wild search to develop a method to harness and controll fusion. They provide energy to us now, they can have a piece of providing hydrogen to future generations. Fair is fair. Once fusion is controlled, then use it to builg plants both make electricity and change water into hydrogen.
I'm no expert. But I imagine that the pipeline system that now crisscrosses and snakes across our country carrying petroleum can simply be replaced with hyrdrogen pipelines and we can cheerfully shoot the Saudi's the finger and leave them to their lakes of oil.
The sooner we get there, the better.
We'll still need petroleum. The plastics that we make from it we be useful for generations to come. But the sooner we get to a time when clean hydrogen powered and electric power vehicles
move us around, and gas powered vehicles become as antiquated and rare as console sized radios, the better.
I tell my daughter the story of how in high school the math/science club wanted to buy a calculator. They were brand new things from Texas Instruments. All they could do is add, subtract, multiply and divide. They cost two hundred dollars, and budding technogeeks, we wanted to buy them. We started raising money. It took a couple of months, and by that time, the price had dropped to about a third.
Technology is a blessing. It's nimble, and ever changing. It gets better, and smaller, and cheaper. But it only came about because people were daring and though outside the box. They didn't listen to the naysayers, they forged on. Our desktop computers, which you can buy for less than five hundred dollars, would run rings around the enormouse machines that in my day took up large rooms and cost millions. What stories will our children tell about the technology they now use?
Will their children and grandchildren scoff at stories about stinky gas powered cars?

I sincerely hope so.