Posted on 01/31/2006 12:25:34 AM PST by truemiester
The world economy is currently running on a resource that is controlled by our enemies. This threatens to leave us prostrate. It must change—and the good news is that it can change, quickly.
Using portions of the hundreds of billions of petrodollars they are annually draining from our economy, Middle Easterners have established training centers for terrorists, paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers, and funded the purchase of weapons and explosives. Oil revenues underwrite new media outlets that propagandize hatefully against the United States and the West. They pay for more than 10,000 radical madrassahs set up around the world to indoctrinate young boys with the idea that the way to paradise is to murder Christians, Jews, and Hindus. It was men energized by oil-revenue resources who killed 3,000 American civilians on September 11, 2001, and who have continued to kill large numbers of Westerners in Iraq and elsewhere. We are thus subsidizing acts of war against ourselves.
And we have not yet reached the culmination of the process. Iran and other states are now
(Excerpt) Read more at taemag.com ...
A decent read about getting out from under Middle-Easter oil producers. Sounds do-able with out to much 'pie-in-the-sky' technology. My first post.
I'm reminded of the old joke about the 10-year-old boy who had never said a word for his entire life. One evening at the dinner table, the boy said to his father, "Pass the potatoes, please." The stunned father shouted, "Son, you can talk! But why have you been silent all of these years?" And the son replied, "Everything's been fine up 'til now."
"If we are to win the critical energy battle, there is only one way to do it. We must take ourselves, and the rest of the world, off the petroleum standard. Only by doing this can we destroy the economic power of our enemies at the very foundations. Only in this way can we transfer control of the future from those who take their wealth, pre-made, from the ground (and therefore have no need for education or freedom), to those who make their wealth through hard work, skill, and creativity (who thus must build free societies which maximize the human potential of every citizen)."
I agree with Dr. Robert Zubrin. Energy conservation is not the answer. In his article, Dr. Zubrin calls conservation a "daydream":
"Ritualistic calls by utopians, moralists, and environmental absolutists for energy conservation are utterly inadequate and doomed to failure. To see this, simply run the numbers. Every year, about 17 million cars are sold in the U.S.—roughly 10 percent of the worldwide total. Even if Americans were to buy only hybrid cars offering a 30 percent fuel saving over existing models, and none of them drove more, and there was no expansion in the U.S. vehicle fleet, this effort would result in only a 3 percent annual reduction in global gasoline use."
It is important that when policymakers make policy, they have the numbers. It is interesting to find out that we only have 10 percent of the world's cars. Many would have you believe that it was much higher and we were major energy hogs. This is not to say that we don't use lots of energy. Thirty percent of the energy use in this country is in manufacturing. Twenty-five percent is used for transportation. It is near impossible to find out what percentage of our transportation energy is for the distribution of products. I would guess distribution takes a sizable chunk of our transportation energy. I have no idea what percent air travel demands from the total energy use. To put our energy savings on the back of the passenger car would have little effect when you look at the total energy picture.
Instead I've heard he's going to try to sell us traditional Democrat issues like health care. No vision there. Petroleum will be used as a weapon very soon and as always we'll look stupid for our appetite for oil and our unwillingness to solve this dependency.
Horses, by gum. I'm buying stock it a buggy whip factory...um er ah...he he...bicycle tire patch company...shoe leather tannery. On second thought, I think I will keep my auto and wait to see what happens.
It speaks to the relative strength of our enemies. In a stand up fight, they would be like dust in the wind.
The other area where we need a lot of research and new ideas is in electric power generation. Our current electric power generation system is like the old mainframe computer era: everyone is connected to big central processing plants where all the power is produced. We need a much more flexible, distributed power generation system even if this slightly raises the cost of power from big utilities--more like the internet. All kinds of power could be generated locally through wind generation and solar generation. Wind and solar generation won't work well every day, but of course they will work well on breezy days and sunny days. Wind generators could even be built almost invisibly into the roof line of houses and be connected up to battery storage units. Our power generation policy stinks and it's driven too much by the one priority of minimizing the production cost of big utilities, even if the taxpayers later get stuck with all the costs of nuclear waste disposal and acid rain.
Our energy policy needs a lot of improvement and it's influenced too much by radical environmenalists, big utility companies and foreign lobbyists. We need more good old American ingenuity and you'll be seeing that increasingly in the future. We have underinvested in energy research over the last 25 years, but that is changing rapidly. This will be a totally different economy in another 25 years. It has to change because the price of oil is going to keep going up.
As you like, but the rest of us won't.
The problem of nuclear waste is strictly one of perception. People are killed by fossil fuels all the time and in many ways that never would have been accepted in the nuclear industry. If safety were truly your concern, you would demand nuclear power.
A great article.
The national security issue may well be the cruncher in getting this sort of thinking moving.
Spending our lives worrying about the price and availabilty of Oil and what that can do to the economy, especialy when the owners are useing the profits to take us down, is plain crazy.
What you say is true jwpjr but the reason it has become a four letter word stems mainly from the "enemy within" being the messenger.
While they drive around in their limos listening to whale song, the enviro-wackos attack everything we do yet offer few solutions. Even when they do offer a solution like wind power some of their own ilk complain about birds flying into them.
Nothing a Conservative does will ever satisfy the commie-enviro-wackos (CEWs) so, yes, we do develop a knee jerk reaction when we hear conservation and that should not be the case.
However, you cannot conserve yourself out of this energy problem but it is unlikely anyone can find a single solution to our energy needs and as long as we have to offer up the silver bullet to the anti-American CEWs they will continue to reject any proposal.
I concur. Now, if we can just get the Politico's to pay attention.......
A hallmark of the human experience is that the majority of us don't do anything until we HAVE to. Whether it's taking out the garbage, seeing the doctor or making final arrangements we put it off for as long as possible.
Politicos will pay attention when it's too late to do anything other than take herculean measures. We've known for 40 years how dependent we are on our enemies for the very lifeblood of our economy.
For some reason we just don't seem to be able to handle a situation when it could done with relatively simple measures. In the end we solve the problem with efforts that are a thousand times worse than those that would have worked early on.
When it's all said and done, we have no one to blame for the coming crisis but ourselves. We are the ones who demand more and more energy and at the same time let a minority among us stymie any attempt to find other resources. But another foible of the human condition is that the more we become aware of our problems being of our own doing the harder we fight to blame them on someone else.
It's only a matter of time before our enemy is no longer as dependent on the income from our addiction as we are on the addiction and then all bets are off.
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