{^_-}

All of this is Econ 101, as the U-L notes. That may be a bit below King Banaian’s focus as chair of economics at St. Cloud State University, but I’m pretty certain that King would be gracious enough to schedule a lecture series for Congressional Democrats who want to learn how markets work rather than continually work from ignorance to the detriment of the nation. (via Let Freedom Ring)

The Democrats are not ignorant of basic economics.

They are malevolent towards America’s strength and dominance in the world, and are willing to play stupid in order to advance their goal: Worldwide socialism.

Feigned ignorance is either stupidity or malice. Anyone who has been elected to national office is almost certainly not that stupid, leaving malice as the only reason to oppose policies backed up by the most basic economic principles.

I wouldn’t expect it to be a substitute for drilling for oil since the quantity of waste we produce wouldn’t produce much hydrocarbon.

I have a passion for SciFi and just wanted to get the chemistry correct.

Thanks again, I’m done. ‘night.

hair-brained

I think that’s supposed to be “hare-brained,” as in “having a brain the size of a hare’s brain.”

Just sayin’.

Buying this for every member of Congress would be… less expensive than anything Congress has done, ever.

I’m aware of that, and such things occur naturally, as was seen in the Exxon Valdez oil spilll, but the product produced is very small, and the expenses quite large.
What I think is more feasible is the marine algal approach, which has the advantage of using the huge mass of marine biotic material and the large amount of algal biota.
We know how great algae are at making oil to start with – it would be fitting tohat we find a way to speed up that process!
Swithcgrass and the entire cellulose approach, I feel, is crap. If it’s mass you need – go to the ocean!

Also, I would be interested in your reaction to the patented process (freepatents online) where solid waste is converted, at high temperature, into coke, and hydrocarbons.

I would assume that input energy costs would be very high, unless the process could utilize waste heat from some other process (nuclear power generation perhaps?), or in the future where a space based, or a lunar based process that would have access to highly concentrated solar energy.

I hesitate to post this at the end of a fading thread, but I would be interested in your expert opinion.

Weebork on July 13, 2008 at 4:54 PM

Gold’s abiotic oil theory is probably mostly bs, although it may result in a small component of the overall hydrocarbon spectrum, especially down in the methane/butane gaseous fractions.

If you analyze crude oil as to its constituent components, you very often find a couple of spikes in two of the breakdown products of Chlorophyll – the 18-carbon phytane and the closely related 17-carbon pristane – two alkanes (straight-chain hydrocarbons).
There is no way that this phenomenon could be a random event.
Moreover, green algae are probably the main original biological source of oil – and guess what makes gfeen algae green?

As an aside – all the oil from every dinosaurs in earth’s history probably wouldn’t fill a single tanker of oil and woody plants generally form the coalbeds and not the oilfields!

I pray that I am wrong.

“Any step Congress takes to produce a large increase in future supply … will reduce current prices.”

One should say – instead – that any step Congress takes to produce a large increase in future supply will cause a downward pressure on current prices – it will lower the prices from what they would otherwise have become. The result may be a decrease from current actual prices, or a reduced increase in prices, etc., depending on various factors, such as the strength and expected durability of Congress’s actions, the response of foreign oil & natural gas producers, etc.

RightOFLeft on July 13, 2008 at 4:18 PM

The economic impact of drilling is more jobs, more oil, more manufacturing {Drill pipe, fishing tools, bits, drilling mud, rigs, siesmic equipment, ect.} and a better trade balance.

As Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein wrote in The Wall Street Journal on July 1, “Increasing the expected future supply of oil would also reduce today’s price. That fall in the current price would induce an immediate rise in oil consumption that would be matched by an increase in supply from the OPEC producers and others with some current excess capacity or available inventories.”

It’s worth pointing out that none of Feldstein’s musings here about oil price and supply are the logical conclusion of what’s taught in undergrad econ and almost all graduate classes. Unless, I’m terribly mistaken and I almost never am wrong about this type of basic modeling, basic economic theory does not give enough info to deduce OPEC’s supply strategy over the long run–assuming OPEC as a collective is able to follow such a strategy. In fact, why aren’t the OPEC producers with excess capacity cheating now while the price is high?

Anyway, it seems to me that the Democrats wish to reduce energy consumption–though they aren’t being articulate on this point. So even if the Democrats understood economics better (and they certainly do not understand economics), I don’t see how it would change what they are doing.

What’s funny is that this is happening to CO as well. Californians move there because CA is all screwed up; then the same people support the same laws that screwed up CA. It’s like a virus.

lorien1973 on July 13, 2008 at 12:58 PM

And of course the parallel argument applies to illegal aliens crashing the border, bringing with them the very things you’d have thought they’d have left behind in favor of the melting pot and American Dream.

burt on July 13, 2008 at 5:08 PM

Better yet, why not take all the royalty revenue and use it to fund R&D into any alternative the Dems want. The royalties can be used as payoff to get them to agree to expand drilling. Small price to pay and we have to do the research anyway. How hard can it be to convince them that current revenue should be earmarked to pay for the “great switch” to alternatives they seem to want to badly. At least then they won’t need to raise taxes.

Hey folks every woman and man of them… have in kind , repaid the gov-mint for its’ initial generosity…in the form of the Pell Grant[s].

Money better spent in the US of A… than in Iraq!

You say!

RightOFLeft on July 13, 2008 at 4:18 PM

I have also failed to find an exact analysis of the economic impact of failing to plant next year’s wheat crop.

I do have an exact number for the impact on the caribou population if we drill ANWR.
It’s zero.
STFU and drill – end of story.
No drill – we bleed more money offshore, lose jobs and our dollar is further weakened. And the price of oil goes up even more.

It’s depressing that the citizens of this country is now so pathetically stupid and misinformed that we have to have a discussion as to the importance of something as critical as energy.
How unbelievably puerile.