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" There&amp;#039;s a great editorial in the NY Times today regarding the whole mess over gas prices, competition with China for oil reserves, and the US deficit. Yes, they&amp;#039;re all related. Anyway, here&amp;#039;s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/opinion/02tue1.html?hp Both major political parties have proposals to help reduce gas prices (or, in the case of the $100 rebate, at least reduce the hit on the wallet). All the proposals are a joke. The only way we&amp;#039;re going to bring down gas prices for a meaningful period of time is to reduce demand. The world&amp;#039;s major oil producers are pumping flat out. Our refineries are refining flat out. There is approximately zero wiggle room, hence the &amp;quot;terror premium&amp;quot; everyone keeps talking about. If Iran plays the oil card, we can&amp;#039;t get that oil from someplace else. If a terrorist attack on a Saudi refinery is successful, we can&amp;#039;t get that gas from someplace else.  How do we reduce demand? Seems to me, we have two choices: We wait until we&amp;#039;re forced to, by virtue of declining production or some sort of geopolitical event, or we start now, by conserving. We drive less. We carpool. We eat food from local sources (the average food calorie is embedded with 10 fossil fuel calories, thanks in large part to the 1500-mile drive it made to get to your plate). When it comes time to retire the land yacht, we buy a little runabout that gets 40mpg. These are not painful things. Indeed, they have the potential to strengthen our connections with family and neighbors.  Common wisdom says that a strong US economy is growth-dependent, that unless we can feed that growth with abundant, cheap energy (mostly in the form of oil), we face financial peril. I&amp;#039;m not an economist. I cannot refute this belief with any confidence. But it seems to me that our choices are rapidly diminishing. Maybe it&amp;#039;s time to roll up our sleeves and get on with proving the common wisdom wrong.  And now, rant complete, a couple of questions from an earlier post:  Re: Solar Home Project: Wind to the rescue? If you have any information on Wind home generation, And willing to shared with me... i would like to read up on a few idea&amp;#039;s Thanks Jonathan BH: Hi Jonathan, I&amp;#039;ll recommend a couple of sites. First, the company that produces the turbine we&amp;#039;ll be installing has a lot of really great info on its site: www.windenergy.com Another great site is www.realgoods.com Yes, both these companies would like to sell you something. But they both provide tons of good, free information on wind energy. You can also keep your eyes peeled for my piece on wind and solar pv energy coming this fall in the magazine.  Re: Solar Home Project: Wind to the rescue? I would like to know more about using solar energy &amp;amp;amp; wind turbines for household use, cost, retrictions and self installations. BH: That&amp;#039;s a big question. Or rather, lots of big questions. I&amp;#039;ll point to the same websites I recommended above for Jonathan. Cost ranges widely. Figure at least 10-15k to put in a decent-sized residential system, with batteries and inverter. If you&amp;#039;re going grid-connect, you can subtract the batteries, which will save you anywhere from $1k to $4k. Another consideration: Many, many states have incentive programs that will help defray some of the cost: http://www.betterinsulation.org/energy/index.html "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a622/2728851/>