When do we put a bounty on tree humping, sprout eating, keen wearing, tofurkey making, pot smoking, liberal arts majors?

Not sure about all of you guys, but when diesel hit 4.15 a gallon here, it made me wonder how much stock Gore had bought of Exxon and BP.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/261165.php

The senator also vowed to protect New Orleans from future Category 5 hurricanes, seeming to give little regard to costs.

“First of all, to protect the lives of American citizens, we can always find the money,” McCain said.

Once you stop Hurricanes (and obviously, all causes of accidental death more likely than hurricanes) from killing Americans, we’re not going to have enough money to get paper and pencil to write the word “subsidy”.

Or maybe he has no idea what he was talking about… again. But at least he’s good on spending. you know, except for promising the moon and stars to New Orleans; giving no regard to any possible costs.

Aside from that, he’s pretty good. So he’ll only spend us further into debt on these issues, and not others.

Yep, I feel better now.

Even if only a small fraction of our electricity comes from oil, extensive development of nuclear power would help the overall energy situation. A large fraction of our electricity comes from natural gas, which burns cleaner than other fossil fuels. If some electricity production could be displaced from natural gas to nuclear power, this would lower the demand for natural gas, and lower its PRICE relative to fuel oil for home heating. This could persuade homeowners to switch from fuel-oil to natural gas for heating, thereby lowering the demand for oil. If there were less demand for fuel oil for home heating, refiners would tend to run catalytic-cracking units harder, which are used to convert heavy oil into gasoline, whose demand has not slackened despite high prices.

McCain is right about eliminating ethanol subsidies, even if that doesn’t please corn farmers. The energy required to run tractors to plant and harvest corn, and to convert corn to ethanol is almost as much as the energy obtained by burning ethanol, so it’s much more efficient to at least obtain the FOOD energy from corn, than to convert corn to ethanol.

So far, we haven’t heard anything about the elephant in the energy room–COAL! We’ve got enough coal under American soil to supply America’s electricity needs for 400 years–shouldn’t we use it? True, coal emits more CO2 than other fuels, but CO2 isn’t really a pollutant, and today’s clean-coal technology can obtain energy from coal with relatively low emissions of real pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and particulates. Yes, we do need environmental controls on coal plants, but the technology exists here in America, while the Chinese are building lots of inefficient, dirty coal plants right now! So the choice is–do we build clean-coal plants here, and save our natural gas for other uses, or do we fight “global-warming” and let the Chinese corner the energy market?

What say the Senators who are now running for President?

Settle down.

I did put in the exorbitant cost of monorail systems, so I wasn’t ignoring it. But I used to construct/test nuclear/coal/gas fired power plants, so I DO know what happens when such things are constructed. BART was a first of a kind and my employer built it. It was in a high cost of land area and partly underground; not totally above ground with a small foot print with existing parking available in an owned right of way. And yes it would be more expensive than adding another highway lane as I showed. Even at Disney it was $1 million per mile. But on most highways we are running out of lane expansion room and the overpasses would have to be extensively modified to widen the roads much more. And as with nukes, there is NO standardized design (beyond the reactor and safety systems).

When I worked for the CA community college system analyzing the cost of building the ever expanding system in the 1970s, they saved money by having a small number of standard designs owned by the state with the foundation having to be designed according to the local land properties. In my county school system they were designing each public school from the ground up; such a waste of money. But, as I tried to do, you can’t change that concept when everyone seems to want their own pretty school different from the other. And that is exactly what utilities and regions have wanted, be they nukes, monorails or light rails. In the past decade utilities have started to realize that they can save a lot of money by purchasing standardized units, but that has taken a long time to occur. And AE’s have been slow to offer standardized units. That’s not the American way.

And I do berate frequently, via letters and E-mails, my president and congress for not having a drilling in now off limit areas/energy policy and developing TDP and switchgrass waste to ethanol dump face facilities. While public transportation (or have private industry build and run it) does not fulfill every need but commuting back and forth to work when you have a set schedule is one where clean mass transit has its place. I doubt if NY, London or other large cities could survive without their subway and feeder systems and I wouldn’t want to foot the bill to build one today; paying for BART was enough. But sometimes there is little choice but to do what needs to be done, rather than what you would rather do. The days of driving in unfettered traffic into the city at 8 AM are gone, unfortunately.

Couldn’t agree more. CO2 sequestration is idiotic, and ‘free’ (i.e. subsidized) solar/wind power won’t solve our transportation problems. The problem the right has is that the left has conflated several problems into one: oil shortages, energy independence, AGW, etc., producing the non-sequitors you deride.

Re CO2 sequestration, I keep thinking about that lakeside village in Africa a few years ago where everyone suddenly turned up dead. The only cause anyone could come up with was a buildup if CO2 in lake sediments. The lake burped, and blanked the village with CO2, suffocating everyone.

Solar satellites that beam power back to Earth via microwave would be ’sustainable’, too. That that won’t happen until we have a cheap way of getting to geosynchronic orbit.

I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with nuclear. I like nuclear. I remember defending nuclear way back in the 70’s down in Austin and getting my head handed to me by the leftos. It was then (mid- late-70’s) that this country ran away from nuclear, and we were only saved by cheap coal, which went from 20% of our electrical output to over 50% now.

Remember, we don’t have an electric generation problem; we have a transportation fuel problem. As far as electrical generation, this country should have less problems than any other nation in the world.

As far as solar satellites, what I am concerned about would be quite simply the effect of huge streams of highly concentrated powerful superheated microwave energy through our planet’s ozone layer and upper troposphere. If simple UV causes ozonolysis (as explained to me in my first Organic Chemistry class), can you imagine what would happen with huge streams of microwaves?
Again, what is the damn point of that method of supplying energy, exactly? You’d have to convert it into electricity via some kind of turbine, steam system or some other tranformer system, I imagine, and any conversion would be a certain fraction of the initial energy. In other words, you would lose quite a bit of the energy pushed through our atmosphere. It sounds like something that would rinag the envir’s wackiest alarm bells, in any case: “we’re burning our oxygen! Save the children!!” No-go there, I’d bet.
As far as CO2 sequestration and ignoring coal to go nuclear,
you’d have to approve of the entire left’s fear of a trace gas like CO2 and their propaganda to come up with all these super-expensive way-down-the-line, often-cockamammie schemes to solve a problem that isn’t even really a problem, in any case.
I don’t get it. Just find a way to drive your damn 3000-pound car from one state to another using transportation fuels instead of coming up with unnecessary solutions to non-problems.
Stop playing the left’s game of changing the conversation..
Oil’s $120/barrel – build uneconomical wind turbines, we’re importing too much oil – let’s stick useless solar panels on our roof and make taxpayers pay for it.
These are non-sequitors – non-solutions to a rather serious problem. In other words, pure horseshit.
This combination of shell-game solutions and brain-dead thinking is making experienced oil folks like me pretty damn rich these days, but it is neither right, nor good for our country..

Hugh Hewitt is the man.

“It’s an essentially agnostic point of view on ethanol itself, but it’s the proper conservative response.”

I couldn’t agree more. My only problem with McCain is in the next breath he will talk about the need for the government to stop global warming. One must wonder what steps he intends to take if not with energy subsidies for the purpose of lowering CO2 emissions. I am left wondering if he really does buy into the hoax that mankind’s CO2 emissions poses a global warming threat.

Solar satellites that beam power back to Earth via microwave would be ’sustainable’, too. That that won’t happen until we have a cheap way of getting to geosynchronic orbit.

Of course, the left thinks of ’sustainable’ as ‘free’, which nothing is. Unfortunately, the left has been dictating our energy policy, or lack of one, for 40 years now.

If John McCain had any sense, he’d get out in front of this issue, denounce the left, and come up with a program to ensure energy security in this country, come what may. That’s a big ‘if’.

I agree that in the short term (next 30-50 years) coal is our best bet, by far.

Sounds good.

Squid Shark on April 26, 2008 at 10:29 AM

What the f**k is “sustainable? I hear that meaningless word from the Left. It means precisely zip. The Lewft never knows crap about energy. They are severely retarded on most fronts, but on energy they are both stupid and psychotic, all at the same time.
US coal reserves are massive and almost bottomless. That’s truly sustainable and real.
Coal is the only real solution we have. Yet the Left (McCain’s buddies) want it shut down. By advocating CO2 sequestration, McCain is just sticking the knife into coal. And that is national suicide.

I’d be interested to hear if there is any new evidence in favor of Gold’s theory.
MrLynn on April 26, 2008 at 7:18 PM

I actually know nothing of Professor? Gold. I first heard of it in either 1979 or 1980 when an acquaintance of mine used it as the basis of his doctoral dissertation.(One of the universities I attended had a pretty good petroleum engineering program.)

The little I have heard of it lately, and I couldn’t provide any links, is that more and more evidence points to it. Especially from explorations of deep sea beds and trenches, and underwater volcanic vents.

Kind of hard to prove it by drilling a 6 inch wide hole here and there on the surface.

How do these not-terrible answers square with the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Bill, which comes at an enormous cost, when the Earth has STOPPED WARMING? Maybe ask him about this proposed piece of crap next time.

That bill scares me about as much as his determination to give amnesty to 12-20+ million criminals. And his determination to restrict political speech.

MCCAIN ‘08: HE’S ONLY A LEFTIST IDIOT ON A FEW ISSUES!

DID I JUST READ SOMEONE ADVOCATE FOR F’ING MONORAILS?!!!

Public transportation, though useful in some areas, especially high population zones, are more or less a boondoggle too!

The cost benefit ratio for most cities with public transport at best breaks even – if your lucky.

And it doesn’t matter what the public transport vehicles are fueld with – diesel, gas, LPG, whatever.

Seeing buses drive around twon either empty or with one or two peolple always cracked me up.

And don’t give me that “they’re for the poor”, “underprivileged”, or any of that victimology crap either.

Most of those people could save their money, buy a frickin bycycle, and be better off.

Monorails. Everyplace where they could or would be even slightly ebeneficial already has some form of lite rail, subway, etc.

You may have enjoyed riding the BART, but it cotinues to be a giant boondoggle.

This is one reason we don’t have cheap gas – people are more worried about spouting off every little feel good solution, we aren’t doing what is really needed:

Build more nuclear plants
Drill for more of our own oil
Build more damn refineries so the oil we do have can get made into gas
Stop wasting so much government money on nebulous solar, wind, wave, etc. projects.

If we had spent all (or at least most) of the money we’ve wasted on solar and wind (and ethanol?) we’d be swimming in refineries, gasoline,

and plenty of energy from nuclear.

You were kidding about monorails.

Right?

. . (In fact, the most recent advances in ‘deep’ geology and petroleum science indicate that most of our oil comes not from dissolved dinosaurs and other ‘fossils’ but by methane being produced in the earths outer core and mantle, being cooked and pressured’ into becoming oil.) . . .
LegendHasIt on April 25, 2008 at 11:06 PM

Well I think the conventional theory is that it was decaying plant biomass that led to the formation of petroleum, not ‘dinosaurs’, and certainly not fossils, which by definition are not dissolved.

Be that as it may, I am interested in your iteration of the idea that petroleum is produced deep in the Earth’s mantle. This was a theory propounded by Thomas Gold of Cornell University, and never verified, though I believe there was an attempt made in one of the North Countries to drill very deep wells in search of the hypothetical source of new oil being formed; it was not successful.

There was also a report a couple-two-three years ago of new oil refilling some of the tapped-out locations in the Gulf of Mexico. My recollection is that the possibility that it was just infiltration from other, nearby pools, was never ruled out.

Obviously if the standard explanation for the origin of petroleum were wrong, and Gold’s were right, it would be a boon to humanity, as we would never run out (unless we used oil faster than it was being made). I’d be interested to hear if there is any new evidence in favor of Gold’s theory.

An Athabascan tribal leader in the community of Fort Yukon, Alaska, just above the Artic Circle, told me they are against drilling there. I am for it, so I bit my tongue during my visit last summer.

I often wonder why in every media strip of our interstates leading to major cities there is not an automated elevated monorail system. I see ever more lanes being added but not monorail. We have the park and ride parking area and free right of ways but few simple, uncomplicated monorail systems; Disney has them but not our cities. And why is this? Well the cost may be the problem. A highway expansion of one lane is in the order of $750 k per mile (http://www.dot.state.fl.us/estimates/LaneMileCosts/LaneMilecosts.htm)
and a monorail system can be as high as $141.9 million per mile as in Vegas (http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_monorail004.htm). Even Disney cost $1 million per mile in 1982. Still I hate to see the highway right of ways not being used as we see more and more traffic tie ups, accidents with their human costs and pollution from our private vehicles. I love my vehicles but I did enjoy riding the BART into San Francisco many years ago reading my paper and remembering the old exhausting traffic runs during my earlier 50 mile drive.

funky chicken on April 26, 2008 at 4:38 PM

That is not how I’ll reach a decision.
If you must know, it will be about trust.

Do I have to decide today?
The general election isn’t until November.

I am for government subsidies for food production, because I want food readily available, and cheap (in surplus). I am not in favor of government subsidies for ethanol production because government interference in the market place introduces distortions in that market place.

But McCain’s not conservative enough for you, right?

Buy Danish on April 26, 2008 at 12:39 PM

Yes, I agree.

You have hit a point I had considered appending, and chose to discard. That is politicians who use the power of government to selectively reward party loyalists, and selectively punish their opponents.

Is this program in the national interest?
Has this program had any effect (yet)? It’s that problem of scale.

The article in Iowa Ag Review documents the boom in ethanol/corn production. This means employment and increased economic activity.

rockhauler on April 26, 2008 at 11:40 AM

For Iowans. Meanwhile the rest of us are paying inflated food prices, and not seeing any reduction in the cost of energy. If Iowa was not the first state in the primaries I betcha we would not be in this mess.

sbark on April 26, 2008 at 10:39 AM

Sbark, I’m not trying to refute your examples, I’m trying to learn something here, and what I’m finding tells me this is not a simple problem.

What I find unsettling is McCain’s declaration to end ethanol subsidies that were just recently enacted. It is
this sudden reversal of government policy that is objectionable. If those subsidies were not a necessary part of US energy policy, why did congress enact them? (Duh! epiphany!)

Iowa Ag Review fall 2006.

Where will the ‘new corn acreage’ come from? Visit Northern Illinois around Chicago. What was farm land 40 years ago, is now shopping malls and parking lots. This is true all over the US, and the ag crops produced by that land, has to be grown somewhere else; i.e. western states, where water is scarce and expensive. Water used to produce corn/ethanol is not available to grow vegetables.

What becomes apparent is the scale and complexity of this problem and it will not be solved by government edict. In fact governmental involvement creates other problems which surprisingly require more government involvement.

If you see a contradiction here, you are correct. I am for government subsidies for food production, because I want food readily available, and cheap (in surplus). I am not in favor of government subsidies for ethanol production because government interference in the market place introduces distortions in that market place. Will government subsidies product ethanol in quantities sufficient to reduce retail gasoline prices? We don’t know yet. What other unintended consequences will we discover? We don’t know yet.

Yet we have government subsidies for ethanol production. Ok! Fine! Let’s live with this for a while and see how it works.
The article in Iowa Ag Review documents the boom in ethanol/corn production. This means employment and increased economic activity.

I am not in favor of yet another sudden reversal in government intervention in the market place.

As long as McCain concedes the false premise that “CO2 is a pollutant,” he has unleashed the government to tax and regulate every human activity including the very act of breathing.

landlines on April 26, 2008 at 11:11 AM

Bingo.

I sick and frickin tired of hearing – “core energy strategy”, “sound energy proposals”, blah, blah, blah.

Asking what anyone “supports” is also irrelevant.

I support the Dallas Cowboys winning the Super Bowl, But “supporting” it ain’t gonna do jack shit to make it actually happen.

He should be asked , “What would you DO for XYZ…”

Nail him down on SPECIFICS, not “proposals”, “policies”, or “strategies”.

When you ask about SPECIFICS, you get the kind of BS answer in the first part of this post. Read that shit again will ya!

Does McCain support nuclear power? Of course he does, but what the hell will he actually do to get some? “I will support core strategies to implement broad based energy policices based on sound judgement. I will ensure multi-disciplinary input from all concerned parties to investigate possible and probable means in which to increase national energy production by shattering current political and economic paradigms…”

Do I need to go on with this shit?

Pardon my french, but I think I just wrote exactly what McCain’s current “policies” and strategies are!

And it’s all bullshinola!

As long as McCain concedes the false premise that “CO2 is a pollutant,” he has unleashed the government to tax and regulate every human activity including the very act of breathing.