Posted on 05/15/2003 2:53:33 PM PDT by Incorrigible
Talk is cheap but Saudi oil is expensive
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Liberals complain that all the popular radio talk-show hosts are conservatives. This is not precisely the case. Often these talk-show hosts sound like conservatives. But in fact most are simply boobs. Their job is to sell stuff to other boobs, and the political talk is just window dressing.
I heard a classic example of this the other day when New York radio talker Sean Hannity was holding forth on the nature of our problems in the Mideast. The way to solve our problems there, Hannity opined, was to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.
A worthy idea. I have written extensively on the subject myself.
But this is the same Sean Hannity who regularly touts the virtues of SUVs. He claims to have two of them, and he is on record as stating of SUV opponents, "They tell us that fuel-burning SUVs are bad for America." What sort of mind could utter that sentence? The tiniest econocar is fuel-burning. The question is not whether a vehicle burns fuel but how much.
And on that question, SUVs are indeed bad for America. The so- called "light-truck exemption" in our fuel-economy rules wastes a million barrels of oil a day. Meanwhile, highway deaths have risen for the first year since 1990 thanks to the tendency of SUVs to roll over and kill the boobs who bought them.
Hannity is here engaging in a thought process that I would argue is more typical of the liberal than the conservative mind: Faced with two alternatives, he pretends there is no need to make a choice. But there is. We can have huge gas-guzzling vehicles. Or we can start moving to energy independence. But we can't do both.
Nonetheless, I'm sure the great mass of boobs out there believe that there is a way we can all tool around town in Hummers while also eliminating all oil imports. But this is stupidity, not conservatism. A true conservative approach would involve first deducing what the national interest is on this question and then inquiring as to how to serve that interest.
As it happens, former CIA Director James Woolsey has done just that. In a recent issue of Commentary magazine, Woolsey laid out a four-point plan for reducing America's energy dependence. The plan is a bit complicated, but I'll sum it up in a few words: Soldiers should drive Hummers; civilians should drive cars.
There is no way, says Woolsey, that America will ever be able to produce enough oil to fuel our current fleet of gas guzzlers.
"We will not come anywhere near being able to break our dependence by producing more oil domestically," Woolsey writes.
To the boob mind, all we have to do to solve our problems is tap the oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That's a good idea, but it would have a relatively small impact. The United States, Woolsey notes, has a mere 3 percent of the world's proven oil reserves. Tapping the refuge would bring that up to just 3.3 percent. Meanwhile, we consume 25 percent of the world's annual oil production.
Since we will never have enough oil, it follows logically that we should use the oil we have more efficiently. Woolsey proposes a system of tax incentives and rebates to get the American people to give up their gas-guzzlers in favor of hybrid gas-electric vehicles.
On the foreign front, Woolsey proposes that we could help the Russians increase their export capacity by 50 percent with a minor investment, thus diluting the Saudis' control over the market. The third point of his plan would be an effort to produce more ethanol through the processing of plant materials. The fourth is to greatly increase the strategic petroleum reserve.
The Woolsey plan may have its flaws, but at least it is a plan. Unfortunately, the current administration, like the talk-show hosts, is simply pandering to the boobs. The Bush administration is putting the interests of the domestic auto industry and the international oil industry above the national interest. To fool the boobs, they talk about developing hydrogen-fueled vehicles. These don't exist and probably never will. But we could have safe, 35-mpg hybrids in a few years. But we can't have 12-mpg SUVs and also wean ourselves off Saudi oil and the terror it finances, says Woolsey, who was an expert on the subject long before 9/11. The Saudi leaders use our oil money to finance the fanatically anti-American Wahhabi sect of Islam. Woolsey writes that "the Wahhabis' reach has spread as far as Malaysia and Indonesia and indeed into a substantial number of organizations, lobbies, mosques and Muslim schools in Europe, Britain and the United States." He adds that "the world hardly owes anyone a living for being lucky enough to sit on top of so much its oil." Well, it does if we're stupid enough to buy that oil. And at the moment, we are. Paul Mulshine (PMulshine@starledger.com) is a Star-Ledger columnist.
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
AHHHH. I'm a Mulshine fan and a Hannity fan. The cognitive dissonance is tearing me apart. Ahhhhh!
However, I don't consider myself a boob!
That said, I agree with Mulshine in general regarding SUVs.
Other Mulshine Anti-SUV columns:
SUV drivers go off-road (FR Thread)
The war must be over [Paul Mulshine] (FR Thread)
SUVs: High Rollers, Licensed To Kill (Warning, this links to CommonDreams.Org, an enemy of freedom)
I'll give up my SUV's when you can get it out from under my cold, dead right foot!
Oh yea, and when the manufactures start making regular vehicles that 6'6" folks can ride in and drive - comfortably.
Mulshinney is a boob - in my SUV warped opinion.
LVM
For one thing, the U.S. doesn't "rely" on Saudi Arabia for oil. We get oil from places like Saudi Arabia for the same reason we get electronics from Asia, bananas from South America, and unskilled labor from Mexico -- because these places provide these commodities at the lowest prices.
Mulshine should also do some research and find out how much less "dependent" we have become on Saudi oil over the years. Saudi Arabia is still the single largest foreign supplier of oil to the U.S., but it has now fallen behind the combined Western Hemisphere sources like Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Ironically, the best way to keep the U.S. from buying Saudi oil is to figure out a way to make oil even cheaper. Over the last ten years, oil imports from Saudi Arabia were at their lowest when oil was trading at $12 a barrel. At low prices, the cost of shipping Saudi oil to the U.S. becomes a major factor that makes us a less attractive market to them.
I'd also like to see someone in Mulshine's position find out how much oil is actually used to produce gasoline in the U.S. I may be wrong about this, but I was under the impression that the quantity of oil used to produce gasoline is dwarfed by the oil used to produce things like aviation fuel, lubricants, etc.
2003 Subaru Forester
With the raised roofline, you can probably wear your ten gallon hat too!
What Is Made from a Barrel of Oil?
Crude oil can be refined into a number of petroleum products. The amount of each product differs significantly between countries. In Europe, where diesel fuel use is prevalent, 36% of the refinery yield is diesel and only 20% is gasoline. In North America, only 23% of the refinery yield is diesel and 41% is gasoline. The OECD Pacific countries have a higher yield of kerosene than the other OECD regions.
Source: International Energy Agency, Monthly Oil Survey, January 2002.
Note:
Gasoline includes motor gasoline, jet gasoline, and aviation gasoline.
Kerosene includes jet kerosene and other kerosene.
OECD North America includes the Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
OECD Europe includes Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
OECD Pacific includes Australia, Japan, Korea, and New Zealand.
Plus, the low sulfur coal that is best used for old power plants is located in Utah in a location that Clinton declared a National Monument. Where's the other source of low sulfur coal, Indonesia!
Click the link below:
Why can't we do both? Drill in ANWR, and keep the SUV's and we've "start[ed] moving to energy independence" and kept the SUV's.
Boob.
By the way, I'm amazed at the freepers who want to eliminate SUV's, which would have to be done via government "encuragement" at the very least. So much for freedom, even in this forum.
There's an interesting article in the current "Science" (I think it was) that describes a process that can turn virtually anything with carbon in it to oil for a resonable cost. They've just opened a plant that turns turkey guts from a packing house into high grade oil at $18/bbl. The process will work with shale oil, coal, plastics, garbage, even human $hit. The cost varies depending on what you start with. They think they can get the cost down somewhere around $9-$12
The secret to the process is they don't attempt to "dry" the input substance first, but pressure cook it which recombines molecules befor they feed it into a standard oil cracking system.
I wish they separated aviation fuel from gasoline, though. LOL.
Source:
Louisiana Mid-Continent
Oil and Gas Association
Refinery Output and Final Products
|
|
Refinery Yield Per Barrel of Oil |
Final Products Made From Crude Oil |
|||
Gasoline | 45.8 Percent | Ink | Cosmetics | |
Jet Fuel | 10.7 | Heart Valves | Sneakers | |
Liquefied Gases | 3.6 | Crayons | Bubble Gum | |
Kerosene | 0.3 | Parachutes | Car Bodies | |
Distillate | 20.9 | Telephones | Tires | |
Residual Fuel Oil | 6.8 | Brassieres | House Paint | |
Feedstocks | 2.9 | Tape | Ammonia | |
Special Napthas | 0.4 | Antiseptics | Eyeglasses | |
Lubricants | 1.2 | Purses | Life Jackets | |
Waxes | 0.1 | Deodorant | Fertilizers | |
Coke | 3.9 | Panty Hose | Movie Film | |
Asphalt | 3.2 | Shoes | Loudspeakers | |
Still Gas | 4.8 | Volleyballs | Basketballs | |
Miscellaneous | 0.5 | Tape | Combs | |
Shortage (gain*) | -4.9 | Floor Wax | Gasoline | |
*The final total product of a refined barrel of crude oil may exceed 1 barrel, since some of the lighter liquids are in a near gaseous state and accordingly take up more volume. | This list is only a sampling of the products made from crude oil. It is not intended to be all-inclusive. Rather it is meant to show in just how many areas products made from crude oil are found and used. |
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