Prairie Pundit doesn't think Obama has a viable energy plan;

http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2008/09/obamas-energy-plan-does-not-compute.html

It does appear to me that the politicians from neither party have done any simple back-of0the-envelope analysis on energy. They do not appear to recognize the implications of the "green" energy projects that they talk about, even to the level covered by Prairie Pundit.

Here are some interesting facts not specifically covered in the article. The United States land area is about 2.3 billion acres. Not including Alaska, the area is about 1.9 million acres. Of that about 600 million acres are forest, 600 million acres are pasture, and 500 million acres are farmland. An acre of good farmland can produce about 5 tons of biomass per year. Maybe a ton of biomass can be converted into 100 gallons of ethanol, so maybe 500 gallons of ethanol can be produced from an acre. The US uses 390 million gallons of gasoline per day, or about 140 billion gallons per year. Ethanol only has about 70% of the energy content of gasoline, so it would take 200 billion gallons of ethanol to replace the gasoline. At 500 gallons of ethanol produced annually per acre, it would take 400 million acres to replace the gasoline. The US only has 500 million acres of farmland, so it is clearly impractical to replace all of the gasoline consumed at present in the US. It is expected that the US population will continue to grow as Latin America moves north. At present the population of the US is 300 million, so there is about 1.67 acres of farmland per person. There are some estimates that by 2050 the population will be 500 million meaning that there will only be one acre of farmland per person. The implications of this are that the US will change from being an exporter of food to being an importer. This will put pressure on the available arable land, making it unlikely that there will be much available for production of biomass for conversion to fuel.

All of the "green" energy concepts that can produce a substantial portion of the energy needed by the United States require huge land areas. This makes them problematical for meeting the energy needs of America. Nuclear power offers the best concentrated energy source. There is enough thorium available to power the US for centuries in breeder reactors. We need to be building them as fast as we can. We also need to be drilling for oil and gas, and developing technology for converting coal into liquid fuel.