It is time now to stop enriching countries who won the geographical lottery and sit atop giant pools of fossil fuels deep below, but who despise us.  What is needed is nothing less than a Manhattan Project for Alternative Energy, and it is needed right now.  Hear that, President Obama?

The history of American economics is one of boom and bust, as I have often written about here.  The busts usually turn into booms when a new technology takes hold.  It was railroads in the earlier 19th Century, then a spectrum of amazing transportation and communication inventions from the later 19th through the earlier 20th Century, which brought us telephones, electric lights, phonographs, and the first wired cities for both, and cars, planes, and other mechanized things we now take for granted.  World War II’s urgent need for America to gear up militarily ushered in a boom that went on for decades as we morphed from manufacturing tanks and planes into missiles, bombers, the whole nuclear industry, and the Space Race, which took us to the moon and back in 1969 (it also took me to Woodstock in ’69, but, that is for another column).  In the 70’s and 80’s we all learned to love (or hate) computers, which became integral parts of many of our lives, and then in the 90’s it was the Internet, which gave rise to all the DotCom companies which, by the end of the 90’s led to the DotBomb bust.  The 21st Century has brought us gizmo’s galore, including PDA/Smartphone’s, featuring the ubiquitous Blackberry®, which many of us would no sooner forget to bring into a business meeting than we would forget to wear pants, or dresses.

Now that our economies, and much of the worlds’, are stretched so thin you can almost hear the drumhead beat of layoffs, downsizing, foreclosures, multi-Trillion Dollar deficits and the like, the answer to our woes is staring us right in the face.

The "Manhattan Project," was the name for the highly secret project to develop the atom bomb, supposedly urged on by Albert Einstein in a famous letter to FDR, which has become part of American folklore and can be found in the online Einstein archive (for the curious).  The project was formally named the "Manhattan Engineer District (MED)," and it was run from about 1939 through 1946 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, commanded by General Leslie R. Groves, a remarkable fellow also made famous in many books and movies.  The US, UK and Canada were the official participants and all did an excellent job of keeping it so secret that the world was truly astonished when atomic bombs detonated over both Hiroshima (on Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. (JST) the "Enola Gay," a sole American B-29 bomber, dropped" Little Boy") and Nagasaki (On the following Thursday, August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m (JST) the first plutonium bomb, "Fat Man").  Nobody had even heard of such weapons and few had even dreamed such a thing possible.

The Manhattan Project was the largest focused scientific project of its time and perhaps any other time.  From humble beginnings as just a small 1939 research project, it eventually grew to employ 130,000+ people at a cost of nearly $2 billion WWII USD (which is roughly, $24 billion in 2008 dollars – CPI based- a mere drop in the bucket compared to just what has been handed out of your tax dollars and mine to Citigroup, alone!).  It accomplished the unthinkable and undoubtedly ended WWII before the US had to risk, and possibly lose, the lives of hundreds of thousands more US servicemen and women, including my father and two of my uncles, his brothers, on one side, and my mother’s brother, on the other side – all waiting in either Southeast Asia or the Philippines to be in the invasion force – indeed, I might not now even be here to write this article if those A-bombs had not dropped, WW II had not ended when it did, and my Dad had never come home from a land invasion of Japan (but, that too, is another story).

What we need now is to assemble the Mother of All Blue-Ribbon, Nobel-Elite, Top Scientific Minds alive- task force to start up a Manhattan Project to develop alternative sources of energy.  Put them out somewhere quiet and secret like New Mexico or Nevada, fund them with whatever they need, and tell them they can stop and go back to their regular lives when they come up with useable, practical, economically viable, electric car and truck batteries that last a long time and go fast and far, and other alternative fuels to heat our homes, power our cities, and even de-salinate ocean water to meet the world’s growing needs.  Incentivize it with special Nobel Prizes, oodles of competition-prize money, and whatever else motivates scientists; open parts up to private innovators and inventors working in garages and basements across America right now.  It doesn’t have to be so secret; it just has to be massive and effective.

We have the smarts, we certainly have the labor, and exciting new industries, technologies, and alternative sources of energies offering jobs and whole new ways of life will be the result – real, viable ones that work and are cheap and put an end to the day when we pay such King’s Ransoms to countries that hate us but sell us oil, thus enriching themselves to build fantastical things in their desert homes and to use chunks of that money to invest in American properties and businesses.  In fact, do such a good job that they can drink that oil, because there won’t be much else to do with it.  Do it now.