Doing the same thing over and over again, and each time expecting to get a different result, has frequently been used to define the word “insanity”. If we accept this definition, then members of congress and utility regulators must be insane.

Holding forty hearings on oil prices, taking testimony from the same oil company spokespersons and their highly-paid shills, and expecting to gain new insight, is insane. This, while scores of real academics and nonprofit institutions perfect decades of research on oil decline and their proposals for an orderly phase-out of petroleum, and continue to go unheard.

It is every bit as insane to expect nuclear power utilities –  the same ones that sold us the first round of the polluting, expensive, and dangerous generators under a slogan of “too cheap to meter” – to now doom their industry by developing renewable energy. They would rather spend money on advertisements telling us how green they are, and then use our money to pay for the ads.

This year, residents, businesses, and industries in the United States will spend $2 trillion buying energy derived from oil, gas, coal, and nuclear fuels. At the end of the year, the fuel will have been consumed, we will be poorer by $2 trillion dollars, and the companies we gave this money to will be richer and more powerful. Then, we will head into 2009 with another $2 trillion dollars in hand, give it to them again, and expect a different result.

That is also insane.

Who is telling us that renewable energy is expensive, unreliable, inefficient, impractical, and insufficient to meet our energy needs? Could that message be coming from the same companies that sell us energy from sources that need to be mined and pumped again and again, year after year?

Is it possible that if we instead took the $2 trillion dollars – just one year of energy expenditure, and gave it to small, independent businesses to build public infrastructures that capture and deliver renewable energy, that every American could then have their energy needs met by local, renewable resources? We need to stop saying that what we want is renewable energy, and start saying that we want our energy dollars to go to small, independent, community-based businesses.

Renewable energy is easy to build from the technical and economic perspectives. But between us and renewable energy stands a giant that feeds on $2 trillion dollars a year, and uses the money, above all else, to convince us and our government that we need to keep feeding it.

Until that stops, we will keep getting the same result. Unless, of course, I am insane.

The video newscast that includes this commentary is here.