Posted on 05/06/2004 9:00:54 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
1) Apocolyptic Scare-Mongering makes for wonderful Sci-Fi and crappy policy guidance.
A) Whoever toppled the House of Saud would quickly realize that yea, verily silicon was not edible or potable. They would have Saudi oil production back on line w/in months unless it was toasted by a nuke.
B) We've got 15 centuries of coal in The Rocky and Appalachian Mtns just waiting. Several nuclear power plants have been stone-walled by radical greens. The stone walls will come down when the air conditioner fails in some tenured environmentalist's $500,000 palatial estate. In a word, oil is very replacable if it ever really does run out.
2) On the other hand, we should all stop gripping about fuel and energy prices unless we are willing to work towards two goals; to reduce oil demand severely and rapidly augment our supply. Our biggest problem with oil prices is that we are on a course to burn through 2.5 mil barrels more this year than last. If you pick out at the buffet table, the restauranteur will naturally jack up the prices.
A) CAFE standards on the entire US auto fleet must rise. People say, "but SUV's are safer." I say "not for anyone they collide with." Burn less gas, fund fewer jihaddis.
B) Lower speed limits back to 65. Cars are much more fuel efficient at 60 MPH than at 80 MPH. See comment A on funding the jihaddis.
C) Governments at all levels should operate only hybrid vehicles whenever possible. That would save massive amounts of taxpayer money that Government on all levels spends on gasoline.
D) Drill ANWAR like a $10 hooker.
E) Put up every off-shore drilling rig we can manage. OPEC would whine like a Greenpeace Demonstrator at a spotted-owl shoot.
Energy policy is another issue where we all want the trip to heavan, but nobody is willing to go through dying. Either we sacrifice something, or we get used to filling up at $2.50 a gallon and make it a part of all our weekly budgets.
So while the problem is nowhere near as bad as the scaremongers and bunny-huggers want us to believe, the solution rests in our hands alone. That's probably why we will all drop the ball, buy the tricked-out hummer, and piss and moan on the same webblogs next year about the overbearing price of heating oil and gasoline.
All levels? and and what point does the extra cost of a hybred offset the extra cost of gas $3.50 a gallon? $4.00? $4.50?
A) Whoever toppled the House of Saud would quickly realize that yea, verily silicon was not edible or potable. They would have Saudi oil production back on line w/in months unless it was toasted by a nuke.
This presumes that the hostilities toppling the House of Saud left the oil fields with production capabilities, and that the people toppling them are rational. Seems to me that there are plenty Islamic terrorists that think that it's better for all to die pure than for any to survive.
15 centuries of coal...
Yes, we have the coal. What we don't have is the means to bring mining of it back and the use of it back into production with any rapidity. Plus, there's a reason why we stopped buring coal; it's filthy and has terrible environmental and health penalties.
2) On the other hand, we should all stop gripping about fuel and energy prices unless we are willing to work towards two goals; to reduce oil demand severely and rapidly augment our supply.
Agreed.
A) CAFE standards on the entire US auto fleet must rise. People say, "but SUV's are safer." I say "not for anyone they collide with." Burn less gas, fund fewer jihaddis.
Agreed.
B) Lower speed limits back to 65. Cars are much more fuel efficient at 60 MPH than at 80 MPH. See comment A on funding the jihaddis.
Agreed.
C) Governments at all levels should operate only hybrid vehicles whenever possible.
Agreed. I presume that we're talking about hybrid vehicles that don't require H2.
D) Drill ANWAR like a $10 hooker.
What's that going to buy us? How much oil will that produce? Enough to make any kind of difference? Plus, I'm told that one problem in the U.S. is not the availability of crude, but the availability of refinery capacity.
E) Put up every off-shore drilling rig we can manage.
I wasn't aware we've been bashful about this up to now. How much untapped reserves are there for this?
Energy policy is another issue where we all want the trip to heavan, but nobody is willing to go through dying.
Hear, hear. But there's one other thing that I don't see here, and that's developing capacity in all areas of non-petroleum-based energy production, especially solar, wind, and nuclear. A large fraction of electricity could be generated using these sources, saving much oil in the process and also allowing the production of H2 that could then be used elsewhere, both in static energy requirements and in vehicles. The oil interests will politically oppose this, but it has to be done.
I refer here to the massacre of five employees of the Swiss-based ABB who had been contracted out to run a petrochemical a joint venture of Exxon Mobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corp in Saudi Arabia. It was an inside job. Their killers were Saudi nationals who worked there. This prompted the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia to urge all US nationals -- numbering in the tens of thousands -- to leave the country immediately, because neither the kingdom nor the United States can guarantee their security. This represents a retreat by the United States of historical proportions.
Is this true, and if so, why is it not problematic?
It was a lack of supply at the pump -- caused by price controls on motor fuels that made it pointless to sell gasoline on the retail level.
The author's basic premise (the rapid increase in the price of oil) is flawed. The primary factor in the rise of oil prices is not the lack of supply, or the increase in consumption in China . . . it is the decline in purchasing power of the U.S. dollar against most other world currencies. I did some research on this subject when a similar article was posted about a month ago, and I was not surprised to learn that oil in Europe was cheaper on April 1, 2004 than it had been on April 1, 2003 -- even though the price of oil was supposedly "skyrocketing" that week.
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