新能源经济外文翻译.doc

新能源经济外文翻译
(2011届)
本科毕业设计(论文)
外文翻译
原文:THE NEW ENERGY ECONOMY
Everyone agrees it's time, but the obstacles go well beyond matters of technology. Why real change will take nothing less than a new American revolution
To describe what's needed to wean the country off fossil fuels, people often use the word transition. But transition is too smooth. It suggests steadiness, even inevitability, as if the endpoint is predetermined.
The e of the tremendous push that's now underway to change how the United States and other countries obtain and consume energy is anything but predetermined. There are no definite answers to questions about the role one source of energy or another will play 15 or 20 years from now, no clear sense about the type of fuel if any people will put in their cars, no consensus on how quickly any of this can happen or at what cost.
Nor is the change likely to be smooth and quiet. Instead, it will probably be disruptive, breaking down existing ways of thinking and acting. Not that disruption is bad: Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Austro-Hungarian economist, once spoke of "creative destruction," whereby new technologies and ideas replace old ones, which themselves are overthrown by newer, more progressive ones.
Already, 2009 has been a year of visions, of prophecies. President Barack Obama's inaugural address offered one such vision: doubling alternative energy production in the next three years, updating and expanding the nation's energy infrastructure, saving billions of dollars in energy costs through improved energy efficiency. Think tanks, businesses, industry groups, and environmentalists have laid out their own plans, some more aggressive and some less so.
The sheer number of these plans, not to mention the interest percolating up from nearly all corners of American life, suggests, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu puts it, that "the landscape is changing."
Clean energy is, of course, a narrative that has been slowly developing in the United