Special: The Next Four Years

The 360 special that will be aired at 11:00PM Monday night was also shown last week. It was aired at 11 PM the night John King stood in for Anderson. The discussion between Anderson, David Gergen, and Fareed Zakaria outlined the problems our next president will inherit and how they might be handled.


The discussion on global warming, like the entire report was quite interesting. Anderson mentioned that "what some scientists are talking about is a major societal shift in terms of shutting down all coal plants: not only in the United States but also in China. That doesn't seem realistic."

David Gergen agreed, saying, "That's not going to happen." It surprised me that solar energy never came up in the discussion. Not only was it not discussed here, but I don't remember hearing it mentioned by any candidates. It doesn't appear that it is discussed as a possible solution, or at least a helpful step in solving or improving our energy crisis.


The few occasions where I've heard it talked about, it sounds like a sound solution. I don't think we're going to run out anytime soon. If it did, it probably wouldn't matter because we probably wouldn't survive without it. In an interview with a homeowner in California who had solar panels on his home, he stated that the panels produced more electricity than he could use. I don't remember how they settled on the excess: either the electric company paid him for it or they used it without compensating him for it. The one drawback was that it was expensive to install the solar panels. However, coal isn't exactly cheap and the cost of carbon dioxide emissions can't be ignored either. Maybe if it was used more, the cost of the panels would decrease.

The other instance I recall is a manufacturer of vitamins in Henderson, Nevada, ProCaps Labs. Its roof and adjacent parking structure house one of the largest private solar energy installations in the world. This natural source of energy is used to produce all ProCaps products; ProCaps is the only vitamin manufacturing facility in the world to do this. Just the energy produced from the parking structure runs one of the 250,000-square-foot vitamin manufacturing facilities. www.procapslabs.com (to learn more,go to the bottom right corner of the home page.

Even if those of us in the eastern part of the US, who don't have an abundance of sunlight this time of year can't produce similar results, doesn't every bit count? Wouldn't the sunny states of Nevada and California be able to run entirely on solar power? After all, no matter how many pristine places we trash with oil wells or even if the Mideast gave us all the oil they have, it is a finite resource. It's not going to last forever no matter what. And who knows, maybe we'll have enough oil left so our great grandchildren and beyond won't have this problem to contend with.

I would hope 360 will do some reporting on this subject and get the candidates to join in the discussion.

Stay tuned after AC 360 and catch this report. It is definitely worth watching. To watch a clip, click here http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/

screen caps courtesy of Sahira, merci beaucoup!