“Energy and Innovation: the Foundation for Prosperity”

Our Proposal:

• Transition from fossil fuels to unlimited sustainable energy as quickly as possible
• Invest in education infrastructure to make lifelong learning a low-risk, high return endeavor

The Goal:

• Create an economic foundation upon which to build a new age of widespread and ever-greater prosperity

Explanation:

The Solutions Party believes that human innovation powered by abundant low-cost energy is the foundation for prosperity. Creating a dynamic, prosperous, and job-creating economy means engaging as many creative minds as possible on one hand, and powering the resulting innovation with ever-more available and inexpensive energy.

Part 1: Energy

Currently fossil fuels are the foundation of the world’s energy supply. The problems with fossil fuels? For one, they are non-renewable, which means with each passing year there are less of them, and what remains are ever harder and more expensive to extract—remember the Deepwater Horizon? As world populations and economies grow, competition for these ever-scarcer resources becomes more intense. This should concern everyone: more and more competing for less and less is not a formula for prosperity.

The second problem with fossil fuels is they are an antiquated, dirty source of energy that cause serious health issues and deaths to millions (including hundreds of thousands of newborns annually, according a recent study), and they are the main cause of artificially-accelerated global warming. Fossil fuels are to the planet what smoking is to the lungs.

The third problem with fossil fuels is they are unduly controlled by huge multinational corporations, despots, and royal families. This has been a source of horrific and expensive geopolitical friction that your tax dollars have been used to address, with disastrous results.

Let’s do something about it. 

We recognize that fossil fuels have been instrumental for human progress, but it’s time to give them their gold watch and send them out to pasture—the sooner the better.

The fact of the matter is clean, unlimited energy is everywhere—in the wind, from the sun, in the tides, and below the ground. We should think of energy like water—abundant, inexpensive, and a resource for all. Would we allow our water supply to be controlled by royal families and despots? The Solutions Party stands for shifting as quickly as possible to sustainable clean energy from a variety of sources, including wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear. 

Part 2: Innovation

The other pillar of prosperity is innovation, which is what happens when knowledge and creativity are combined. 

To be prosperous, we need an education infrastructure that produces the most knowledgable, creative, and flexible workforce in the world. A workforce that innovates and can adapt quickly in a dynamic (ever-changing) economy. 

Currently, too many students graduate from high school woefully unprepared to make a life for themselves in an increasingly competitive world. Getting a university degree has become a high-risk, potentially low-return investment; too many graduate from college with staggering debt and very few good job prospects, condemning them what amounts to decades (or even a lifetime) of economic slavery. 

Let’s do something about it.

Let’s invest in education in a way that makes lifelong education and retraining a low-risk, high-return investment. The goal is to give people the knowledge to innovate, and the ability and skills to find new good-paying jobs in an ever-changing economy. 

Achieving this challenge will require a number of steps:

1. Making government more efficient, cutting waste, and using the savings to fund major education reform (more on this in subsequent articles)
2. Offering a variety of educational and vocational-training resources to allow individuals to tailor their learning according to emerging opportunities and personal aspirations
3. Widespread acceptance of the notion that a prosperous economy is like a living entity that constantly changes and evolves, and an innovative and ever-adaptable workforce is the nutrition that keeps the economy healthy, vibrant, and growing. We must embrace constant change, not try to shield ourselves from it. 

Part 3: Harnessing Unlimited Clean Energy and Innovation

Unlimited clean energy and a well-prepared, innovative and adaptive work force, together with principals-based businesses, efficient government, and well-funded academia, will be the combination that will allow us to create opportunities by tackling the tough problems and therefore improve lives everywhere. Examples of prosperty-increasing projects include:

1. Desalinating seawater: desalination is energy intensive, but with ever-greater clean energy at our disposal, converting sea water will become practical. This source of unlimited fresh water that will improve living standards, ensure more robust agricultural production, help defuse potential geopolitical conflicts, and save aquifers, among many other things.
2. Realizing cheaper transportation: unlimited electric power means “filling the tank” will be inexpensive, and unlike fossil fuels not subject to global marketplace-driven price variations. 
3. Making hydrogen to replace fossil fuels: with unlimited renewable energy, hydrogen can be extracted from water cheaply. This hydrogen can be used for a huge range of applications, including vehicles, and as a back up source of energy when other sources of renewable energy are operating at lower capacity. 
4. Removing plastic waste from the environment: energy and innovation for recycling plastic waste instead of just dumping it, and to clean such waste from the oceans.
5. Creating economically viable space launchers 
6. Much, much more

The myriad and complex challenges facing our country and the world are actually great job-creating opportunities—problems to be tackled with business-driven solutions, innovation, and carefully targeted government incentives. 

Let’s take these challenges on, overcome them, and create widespread prosperity in the process.