Blogger's Note: For reasons more mysterious and fickle than White House global warming policy, a column I wrote for The Mercury recently was never posted on our Web site. (I suspect the hand of the Islamo-Fascists at work.) And so, being intrinsically lazy and not wanting any of the dozen-or-so people who are reading my blog to miss out on some of my insightful rhetoric, it is reproduced here in my blog space, no doubt to the delight of all cyber-space.

Sometimes I truly marvel at our collective stupidity in the face of our own brilliance.

Dennis Miller once said only in America, could you take something that falls for free from the sky, bottle it and sell it at a profit.

He was talking, of course, about rain, but the same observation could be made about another seemingly endless resource – sunlight.

The promise of solar energy as our primary generator of electricity is staggering, particularly in places like Arizona, where clouds all too often fear to tread.

When you think about it, all fossil fuels are merely converted solar energy anyway, so we’re already using it.

But would’t it be nice to use it without all that pesky carbon?

It could happen.

Solar panels that covered 100 square miles of Arizona dessert, where the sun shines 325 days a year on average, could theoretically power the entire country, according to Ardeth Barnhart, associate director of the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

And guess what? In our brilliance, we’re nearly ready to try.

Plans for a huge, $1 billion solar energy plant near Gila Bend, Ariz. could be completed by 2011.

Now that sounds like the kind of thing the federal government should subsidize in some way, perhaps with a beefy tax break.

And guess what? We did – almost.

The federal investment tax credit was boosted from 10 percent to 30 percent for investments in solar systems in 2006, thus making the Gila Bend plant affordable for investors taking a chance on new technology that could transform the American energy landscape.

At three-square miles, Gila Bend would generate enough power to light 70,000 Arizona homes and help Arizona utilities to meet government requirements that utilities generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources.

Now that is the kind of innovation and know-how Americans can get behind.

But there’s a problem, and yes, it’s our own government taking aim squarely at its own foot.

And you guessed it; this is where the stupid comes in.

The tax break expires this year and, if it does, so too do hopes of building this large-scale solar power plant that could serve as a model for the future.

And while we hear no end of permanently extending the tax cuts for the rich which have bankrupted our children’s future, we can’t seem to extend one that might actually save the future.

According to a write-up in The Christian Science Monitor, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, is trying.

Her idea, novel in its simplicity and common sense, is to extend the credit to 2016 by cutting back on the tax credits we’re giving oil and gas companies.

You may have heard of them, they are the ones which have made more than half a trillion dollars in profits since Mr. Bush moved into the White House.

“In the next five years, (oil and gas companies) are slated to receive about $117 billion. That money instead should be going toward renewable energy,” Giffords told the Monitor.

And where is John McCain in all this? You would think this would present a triple pander opportunity few would miss. He gets to tout his home state, bring jobs there, and call it part of his green energy initiative.

If you’re not worried about how this short-sightedness will leave us behind – again –consider this passage from the May issue of Fortune magazine: “Germany has invested $1.3 billion in photovoltaic research over the past decade, creating a $5 billion industry that accounts for 52 percent of the world’s installed solar panels. Of 45 producers in Germany, 33 are start-ups in the former East German, employing 70 percent of the industry’s 8,000 workers, with 2,000 new jobs on the way.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to say that about an up-and-coming American industry?

But once again, our unwillingness to recognize that oil is a dying industry, and oil’s unwillingness to recognize it and invest in a new technology, will doom us to be capitalist dinosaurs in another burgeoning technology.

Last week, Senate Republicans blocked an energy bill that would have imposed a windfall profits tax and ended $17 billion in tax breaks for oil companies.

Bush, who has overseen a doubling in gasoline prices since he took office, threatened to veto the bill, which would not have imposed the windfall profits tax on any company that invested in renewable fuels or electricity production.

The clock is ticking here folks, and we keep ignoring it like it will all work itself out by itself. It's time to do something different.

Do we want to be left behind again by short-sighted politicians? Or are you OK with buying all our solar panels from Germany?