We have work to do here in Hawai‘i.

When I went to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference in Houston a couple months ago, oil had just hit a new record high of $84 per barrel. We conference-goers all knew that oil would hit $100/barrel soon.

Which it did Sunday.

$100 oil!

Several months before that conference, I’d already started noticing that prices for fertilizer and most farming supplies were rising steadily. It seemed unusual. I felt like a frog slowly heating up in a pot on the stove.

As I listened at the conference to speaker after speaker telling us how grim the future looked in the face of declining world oil supplies, it occurred to me how fortunate we are in to live in Hawai‘i where we have abundant alternate energy sources. We have geothermal, hydroelectric, solar and wind power possibilities. I did not have the heart to tell the people I met there how fortunate people in Hawai‘i are in these changing times.

Yet right now, our energy costs are the highest in the nation. Here in Hawai‘i we use 50 million barrels of oil per year. At $100 per barrel, this amounts to $5 billion leaving our economy for the Middle East every year. We need to fix this.

I think that we need to empower our citizens, by subsidies if necessary, so they can sell electricity back to the electric utilities at “peak times.” Instead of relying on only a handful of industrial-sized power plants, we need to spread our risk and empower individuals and small businesses.

After tourism and the military, discretionary income is what powers the local economy. Every dollar we can avoid sending to the Middle East is a dollar that can multiply in our local economy. We must do this because we now have the highest cost electricity in the entire nation.

Why don’t we give the money we would send overseas to our homeowners and small businesses, instead? Wouldn’t we rather pay our neighbors, where the money can circulate in our economy, instead of sending it straight overseas?

We can fix this. Not, no can. CAN!