OK, so you’re feeling the pinch of the most recent energy crunch. It sounds like a good idea to drill for oil in the backyard and put the vacation home up for sale to make room for that nuclear power plant you were so opposed to last year. Wait! Wait! Don’t panic!

Energy supply is not merely the provenance of OPEC or the giant corporate providers to the power grid in America. The value of having large corporate interests power your home has faded and is a security risk to America. Technology exists today, and is being continually advanced, that gives us the opportunity to change the way we view power supply, offering us improved security while enhancing the way we live. This technology puts power in the hands of each household in America and releases the stranglehold power companies have on you and your family. Energy independence can begin at home. You and your family can be independent of the energy industry. Our nation can stop being bankrupted by the energy industry.

National security is jeopardized by centrally supplied power sources for the simple reason that potential attacks against a centralized source must be defended against. This is accomplished only at great cost and with incalculable use of the very energy we seek to conserve. Centralized power creates a condition of ever-mounting expense related to staying ahead of possible attacks. If electric supply is decentralized (supplied by each household) the ability for attacks against “the” power supply is nearly eliminated. Further decentralization of government and corporate locations would also greatly reduce or eliminate any need for large-scale centralized power. In order to affect power supply adversely an attacker would need to disrupt millions of individual households and businesses not merely one central location eliminating the need for massive security efforts and permanently securing our energy supply. The reduction in centrally supplied energy needs would eliminate all reliance on foreign energy sources and could be achieved one home at a time. Expansion of drilling leases would provide only the possibility for minimal relief and would require at least a ten-year investment of resources before any potential benefit could be realized. The subsidies being provided to the oil giants could be better spent assisting Americans in become personally energy independent. Yes, personally energy independent. The spirit of the rugged individualist can be expressed though each household’s independence from the grip of big oil, gas and coal.

The perceived need for enormously expensive nuclear plants can be eliminated as well. There is no answer, looming on the horizon, which addresses the never-ending threat of nuclear waste. Considering nuclear waste disposal issues and the danger inherent in proliferation of nuclear material, there can be no rational argument for taxpayer assistance of any sort to the nuclear industry. The free market system will keep speculators from such a risk, and without government assistance, the expense of building and operating nuclear power plants significantly alters the cost/benefit ratio.

Subsidies and tax benefits given to the nuclear, oil and gas and electric power industries can be stopped. Subsidies can be given to each and every American household to assist people in growing into wind, solar and geothermal, etc., ending our national dependence and more importantly our personal dependence on energy supply. In all regions of the country sufficient combinations of renewable energy supply are available to end, or, at least presently, greatly reduce, your families dependence on electric power supplied from a cumbersome, expensive, unreliable, and insecure power grid that has outlived it’s usefulness to American homes. A national policy allowing individual energy generation to augment the grid (not merely net metering but providing energy to the grid for payment to the small producer) would further advance homeowners cost/benefit expectations. It is the industries stranglehold on the public that is currently preventing that condition, not any sort of logistical or technical insufficiencies. Some nations are currently allowing and in fact encouraging such resale of energy back to the grid with great success and popular support. The Energy Lobby has prevented sale back to the grid in many states.

Americans have long held that Bigger is Better and Too Much is not Enough. “Wake up, honey, wake up. It’s time to go to school.” Oh, sorry, no time for such little niceties. Bigger is NOT better and TOO MUCH is TOO MUCH.

The answer to our energy security and out of control energy cost is not digging for more oil and gas. Independence does not reside in negotiations with Saudi Arabia or in reliance on the world’s largest, most out of control, energy grid. Cost control is not found in billions of your tax dollars spent on government giveaways to private corporate interests. Forfeiting tax dollars for the construction of nuclear power plants that are unsafe and disastrous to the environment (don’t be fooled… nuclear is not green and the waste will remain not green for hundreds of millions of years) must come to and end. No fiscally responsible government can justify subsidies to investment speculators and private corporations. Investors and speculators become involved in projects for profit. If we are to believe in a free market, they must be allowed to succeed OR FAIL, not as a result of public money, tax money, YOUR money, but based upon their ability to exist in the marketplace. You see, the free market door must swing both ways, or it is not a free market at all. The gift of oil and gas subsidy creates unfair advantage for existing giants and keeps America from creating opportunity in a world market that could be abundant with better American ideas.

It’s not such a stretch to imagine individual energy independence. The importance of removing roadblocks to personal independence (allowing individual to generate energy for fun and PROFIT), ending taxpayer subsidies for private, for profit, corporate entities and adopting a National energy approach that, rather than hampering, actually assists citizens in achieving individual energy independence cannot be overestimated.

The culture of, bigger is better and too much is not enough, has been an enjoyable little dalliance for Americans, but sorrowfully exposes a sophomoric if not juvenile world view. As each generation assumes the role of cultural “parent” to future generations, the willingness to relinquish childish games is often defining. In opposition to the shame of planetary pollution and economic enslavement, individual energy independence is a paradigm shift a “parent” can pass along with dignity, maturity and pride.