[Sherman Logan]

How about ... conquering the Middle East and taking their oil away?

All of these arguments primarily point out how efficient oil is as a source of energy. Its only real drawback is that it is presently controlled by insane people who want to kill us.

So kill them first and take it for ourselves. Problem solved. Probably cheaper than most of the alternatives, too.

This option, which we never even discuss, is the very first one that would have occurred to most civilizations in history. Never in history has so much tribute been voluntarily paid by the strong to the weak.

[Kellis91789]

"Its only real drawback is that it is presently controlled by insane people who want to kill us."

That isn't its only real drawback. Granted Global Warming is a scam, but the internal combustion engine running on any hydrocarbon fuel is still an inefficient, dirty, polluting machine. Ethanol and biodiesel are only better than petroleum fuels in a relative sense. The only reason to use them at all is that tooling and retrofitting costs for existing automobiles/trucks is less expensive than entirely new electric drive platforms.

Burning hydrogen created by electrolysis is even more foolish. You accept the losses of the electrolysis process, the storage difficulties of carrying around highly compressed gaseous fuel, and then you burn it in an engine where you get back less than 30% of electric energy it took to produce it ? That's nuts.

If you've got cheap electricity to create the hydrogen, then a much more efficient use of it would be to charge batteries and drive electric motors. At least the overall efficiency there is about 70%. Battery cost and cycle life are the only major unresolved issues, and there are very promising recent developments in that regard.

[Kenny Bunk]

Well, Sherman, I proposed that:
(1) We divide Iraq (fake name, fake country ... actually invented by the British Foreign Office in 1916) back into the natural divisions the Turks used pre-WWI to successfully manage the unruly and largely worthless heathens who infest the place,
(2) de-populate by sending the present recumbents off to settle empty Afghanistan,
(3) re-populate the fly-blown mess with illegal alien Mexicans. We got plenty.
(4) run the place as an oil colony.
(5)I was chased out of Washington.

Kipling had the idea, dude. These are the "Lesser breeds, without the law."

Speaking of laughs, and largely worthless recumbents, when I voted for GW I thought the least I might reasonably expect would be a rational awl policy. After all, GW is a genuine Texas awl man, is he not? How about tax incentives to build more refineries, for starters.