This is what America needs to do. Please read the article for more information.
Posted on 10/29/2006 9:49:48 PM PST by thackney
Energy: Bill Clinton's back, now touting tax hikes for ethanol to California voters. "If Brazil can do it, so can we," he said, claiming an ethanol switch ended Brazil's need for foreign oil. Once again, he's telling whoppers.
Brazil did achieve independence from foreign oil all right. It happened this past April. But Clinton, true to form, doesn't quite recall the critical point showing how it was done.
Here's a clue for the semi-retired former president and policy wonk: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva didn't celebrate the oil independence milestone out in an Amazon sugar field.
No, he smashed a champagne bottle on the spaceship-like deck of Brazil's vast P-50 oil rig in the Albacora Leste field in the deep blue Atlantic. Why? Brazil's oil independence had virtually nothing to do with its ethanol development. It came from drilling oil.
Which is the very thing Clinton, in his Proposition 87 television ads, seeks to pile taxes on.
Clinton is hawking the idea that taxing offshore oil drilling companies, from 1% to 6% — a 600% hike for some — and then turning the spoils into a new government bureaucracy for ethanol development is the way to end California's dependence on imported oil.
"Imagine if we stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it. They made a simple switch to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops. And it's 33% cheaper than gas," Clinton said, neglecting one key detail: cars must use three times as much ethanol as gas.
...foreign oil. If Brazil can do it, so can California."
But as a matter of fact, that's not what Brazil did.
It launched a crash program of offshore oil drilling in the late 1990s, working with a Manhattan Project-like determination to develop its own natural resources.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
This is what America needs to do. Please read the article for more information.
This from the guy [Clinton] who did everything he could to bribe oil contracts with President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev? LOL!
But lets just pretend, for the sake of sheer stupidity, that Brazil DID stop using oil and went totally onto ethanol produced from sugar. Does anybody in America believe that if we suddenly increased our sugar production by about 4000% in order to produce the amount of ethanol needed to replace just Saudi Arabia alone that the Sierra Club would allow it?
The sugar producers get extorted all the time because the super nitrogen-rich run off from the waste of the sugarcane is considered a toxin byproduct and the sugar companies are fined by the EPA for 'poisoning' the rivers and lakes which are downstream from their productions. It is absolutely true that dumping sugarcane stocks is incredibly unbalancing to the environment and causes a host of changes in the ecosystem which are unexpected and unwanted.
But hey, aren't we willing to kill out a few thousand lakes and rivers in order to get rid of foreign oil? Producing sugar in the level necessary to produce enough ethanol to replace foreign oil would create more environmental damage and the damage would be here in the U.S. instead and not in the arabian peninsula. They could consider corn as the alternative but you end up with somewhat the same problem and we probably don't have enough currently turnable farmland to do this kind of output without stopping all production directed at actual foodstocks.
The dirty little secret of enegy independance is high taxes on cars, so people don't have them. Car tax is $10,000.an. They need Arnold!
Won't do any good. The big O is about as dunce and any RAT.
I've been to Sao Paolo. The air is almost as bad as Mexico City.
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That jerk wouldn't get it. He has to be one of the dumbest jerks on tv.
They used to have his paperback on the bookshelf at the grocery store. I took it upon myself, as a civic duty, to throw all of them into the shopping cart and take them over to the toilet paper section and stuff them in the back. Everything bogus bill touched turned to $#![...remember the EV1?
I knew bubba was lying. His lips were moving.
LOL, I knew oil was a part of the fix, but I sure didn't realize it was that significant. Clinton is true to form. He lies about Brazil, and lies about the new gas tax being the savior of western civilization. What a maroon....
Well said, I should toss in that to this day, most Brasilian don't ever expect to ever own a car.
Yes and meanwhile his socialist shrew of a wife is running ads in NY (did you know she is running for the senate here?) saying we should use the oil company's "obscene" profits to fund alternative fuel research! Two peas in a(rotten)pod.
I know the nation could have done a lot better than the two of them. To bad.
No, but he went to Rio to catch up on his bikini shopping. Now we know how he's such an expert on Brazil!
What a whopper-teller he is!
LOL!!!!
Brazil has an extensive alcohol fuel production and distribution network, not to mention huge sugarcane production plantation and cheap farm labor to produce the alcohol. The same would be very difficult to replicate in the US.
Yeah, a tree is known by its fruit. The TREES wasted on that loser's paperback would have been put to better use in the toilet paper section...remember your CIVIC DUTY when you see it in the book section...
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