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I disagree. A large portion of our fossil fuel use is in cars. What you're talking about could help domestic and industrial energy consumption, but transportation energy consumption is a huge portion of the problem.
As Andrew points out a large part of the problem is transportation related, for which innovation has been much slower than in energy generation (energy storage is another field entirely).
There are at least two major political problems.
1) Subsidies of coal and oil continue. They are not substantial relative to the amount of subsidies for corn ethanol (completely absurd), or for wind, solar and especially nuclear power, but removing all of these subsidies would be useful and would still increase the attractiveness of wind or solar over time because coal and oil prices would go up and may continue to do so while the price of wind/solar and even nuclear fuel would remain much more stable.
2) Massive distortions in social policy particularly home ownership in suburbs increases automotive use over mass transit. These take several forms:
a) dominance of local school systems over a school choice free market encourages middle class relocation to suburbs where the local school monopolies are smaller and more flexible than dense urban school districts.
b) home mortgage interest deduction artificially increases the market for home ownership, and depreciation of rental properties decreases interest in renting properties within cities rather than leaving them unoccupied.
c) large subsidies for infrastructure, particularly highways and electricity, continue without generating user fees in order to capture the cost of supplying these public goods and which makes it "cheaper" to live outside of a city by increasing access.
Each of these provides considerable incentives against living in cities for people who otherwise might (there are of course people who actually want to live in suburbia and exurbs). Denser cities would cut down on transportation emissions considerably, and lower electrical power waste from power transmission and this seems a lot lower hanging fruit than pretending the government can select which sort of electrical power generation will be most effective at both reducing emissions and creating sufficient power.
Combined with this, cities have their own obstacles in the form of restrictive building codes (rent controls and height restrictions among them). Many such laws also paradoxically, and foolishly, restrict the use of wind or solar power, others push people away from living in relatively low energy usage locations like California and into suburban California or worse, Arizona or Nevada (as examples). We should be seeking to overturn these laws and restrictions. Trade barriers regarding sugar would be another obstacle.
To be sure, innovation and new technologies would be promising and useful (there's some interesting research on bacteria and energy generation or storage for example), but they will not solve these problems over the long term in a way that densification could by offering a significant reduction in the actual amount of energy and fuels required to power the country.
STS says "There are at least two major POLITICAL problems. " I used caps for emphasis, because therein lies the problem. POLITICS. More specifically, CORRUPT POLITICIANS.
Our currant POTUS has enacted a ban on new drilling in and around the U.S., and he has enacted many CAP & TAX measures, which has made this country TOTALLY dependent on imported crude oil from the middle east.
Get rid of all of our corrupt politicians and maybe we might have a chance at being free again.
The ban on drilling already existed, all Obama did was talk about temporarily lifting it and then didn't in the wake of a massive oil spill. And so far as I am aware no new cap and tax measures have been enacted. They never passed the Senate, didn't even come up for a vote.
Potentially removing either of these is not likely to do much of anything as far as dealing with our energy problems because the amounts of oil available in banned areas are relatively small relative to the amounts consumed by Americans and the energy deficit as a whole. And the amount of current tax on energy in place is very small relative to other countries (Europe or Japan for example), and for the most part is canceled out by favorable corporate taxes to energy and other handouts to coal or oil companies.
That's not to say that these aren't welcome political problems to add to the list, but they are hardly major in the sense that I meant the term. The things I listed are massive by comparison to either of these.
The general sense of corruption is also a problem, since it pervades most of these issues at a local or state level in addition to federal officials.
I suppose you could say I either mis-interpreted the scope of the question, or more accurately "ignored" the transportation aspect of our energy consumption. In any case, my answer was directed more towards our energy generation infrastructure; which has seen so little innovation in the past 100 years that it has literally missed nearly every possible upgrade towards cleaner or innovative energy energy.
I suppose you could say I either mis-interpreted the scope of the question, or more accurately "ignored" the transportation aspect of our energy consumption. In any case, my answer was directed more towards our energy generation infrastructure; which has seen so little innovation in the past 100 years that it has literally missed nearly every possible upgrade towards cleaner or innovative energy.
Between the two, infrastructural power generation or transportation fuels, I'd say that you're still focusing on the wrong one as far as which one has had less innovation and implementation of such cleaner methods or more independent sourcing over the last hundred years.
Cars don't have leaded fuel. And that's about it. (I don't count corn ethanol as an advance of any kind, because I see it as a massive and stupid economic distortion and its use as a "cleaner" fuel is questionable at best). There are hybrids now, and possibly plugin hybrids, but for the most part, the "innovation" of fuel economy was to make our cars smaller, give them somewhat smaller engines, and build them to be more aerodynamic. This is hardly a revolution of cleaner and more innovative uses of energy. And it has been canceled out by a relatively decreasing energy tax on gasoline, more construction of highways (which encourages people to drive more), and thus more congested roads as people drive their smaller cars more often and end up using the same amount of fuel because there is a minimal individual cost perceived for doing so. An actual advance would have led to decreased fuel use and, presumably, a lowered dependence on imported fuels. Maybe some big city air is cleaner, but there were plenty of advances in environmental regulations governing factories and power plants over the same time frame that took lead out of the gasoline and cut down on smog.
By contrast, the US is now the world's largest wind power generator, has used nuclear power for decades (restrictions on this have less to do with big oil or big coal and more to do with people being scare-mongered by environmentalists), uses a lot of hydroelectric power, and isn't that far behind the world's leading solar generators. Certainly each of these fields could use more innovative or efficient designs, and there are other ideas floating out there, but to say that it is the electric grid that is lagging on innovation seems to be an incorrect belief.