44 Comments

1. Neo:

Wishing won’t make it happen.

Every President since Nixon has been trying to reduce the U.S. dependency on oil and their efforts were enough to save enough fuel to power all the new cars on the road.

And don’t give any of the crap about “coal fired” vehicles, I mean the electric cars, most of which are feed from coal burning plants in the Midwest.

The French have 70% nuclear, the Japanese about 50%. The last nuclear plant that attempted to begin construction was stopped because of “environmental racism.” The NIMB folks are everywhere, even the remote deserts of the nation. Nuclear doesn’t make “green house gases” but that’s not enough.

All too often you get the feeling that so many would just like to dawn their WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons left over from the Ford Administration and wish upon a star.

Apr 19, 2005 - 4:56 pm 2. Buddy Larsen:

Kudlow about came unglued over it this afternoon. I guess when you have to fight like a hyena just to appoint a judge or UN ambassador, there’s not much left over for, y’know, fighting the anvil chorus waiting for him to say “nuclear power, and RIGHT NOW!”

Apr 19, 2005 - 4:58 pm 3. Terrye:

The only thing I have heard that really surprised me was Bush’s support for nuclear energy. Somehow I had not expected that.

I think there will be a move away from oil in time just because we will have no choice.

I think I have mentioned this before but I was watching Chrichton on Cspan and he made a comment I thought interesting. He said that as the world entered the 20th century one of the big worries was what would they do with all the horse manure in the future. They were concerned that in a hundred years [about now] our cities would be filthy from the ever growing number of horses. Obvioulsy fate interceded.

I am hoping it will do so again and we will find a way to get that monkey off our backs.

Apr 19, 2005 - 4:59 pm 4. Buddy Larsen:

Neo, many give the movie “The China Syndrome” more credit than Three Mile Island, for our nuclear idiocy.

Apr 19, 2005 - 5:02 pm 5. Terrye:

I live in southern Indiana and coal is a big deal here. There are plans to build a plant to turn coal into gas not far from where I live. But it will take years to get it on line.

Didn’t Bush give the ok to build some new nuclear plants or did I misunderstand?

Apr 19, 2005 - 5:02 pm 6. Neo:

There is a real irony to the movie “The China Syndrome”.

After Three Mile Island and the movie came almost back-to-back, the nuclear industry handed out copies of the movie to potential customers. The main reason .. think hard now about the plot line .. nobody (except the crazy terrorist Jack Lemon character) died. All the systems worked to safely shut down the plant (the damage could easily be repaired).

The real damage came from Chernobyl where an inferior design was put into a more than dangerous mode of operation and worst happened.

Apr 19, 2005 - 5:12 pm 7. Buddy Larsen:

News a few weeks ago, somehow somebody fast-tracked a new refinery thru the EPA, Terrye–our first permit approval in 27 years. A lot of the gasoline pump price is much more a problem of lack of refinery capacity, coupled with the multiple grades/blends that the various states (California notoriously) mandate, than it is the headline price of spot mkt crude.

Apr 19, 2005 - 5:19 pm 8. Terrye:

Buddy:

I remember the 70’s [much as I hate to admit it] and everyone went out and bought little cars and started car pooling and that lasted until gas got relatively cheap again.

I think the reason GM tanked this last quarter was that they under estimated the effect of higher gas prices and kept on pushing the big vehicles.

But you are right, we have built no new refineries.

I was amazed when I read that the largest refinery in the world was in Venezuala.

Hugo Chavez controls it. That is just wrong. That is trouble in the making.

Apr 19, 2005 - 5:27 pm 9. Rick Ballard:

Terrye,

There are keen eyed vultures watching with great interest as GM makes its last wobbles and lurches. There will be some very juicy bits and pieces up for grabs when it staggers into bankruptcy court. No one knows how the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (AKA Uncle Sugar) is going to react when it’s handed GM’s $20 bil unfunded pension liability to digest. GM management and the UAW sure deserve each other. ‘Nother “progressive” plan gang aft agley.

Would you buy a GM car with the bankruptcy court door in view?

Apr 19, 2005 - 6:18 pm 10. Buddy Larsen:

Nah, that last of the sink sure seems to drain faster than the first of it.

Apr 19, 2005 - 6:46 pm 11. Buddy Larsen:

Big Cars–the companies–are in a terrible fix. Ford is leaner but who wants to align with GeoSoros thru the Ford Foundation? UAW wages relative to the global market are the main reason the Dems have gone protectionist and spun in on the global scene. GM is gonna have to break their pension fund deal anyway, there’s just no blood in a turnip. It’s ghastly for the rank and file, a slow-rolling blindside that all along they’ve been told “don’t worry about it, we’re the fix-it party”.

Apr 19, 2005 - 6:53 pm 12. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

That refinery is here in AZ, and the previous one was blocked by a bogus environmental racism lawsuit threat (see here for original blogreporting) (mistaken above for a suit that stopped a nuke plant).

The problem with energy “solutions” is that oil is too good a fuel. Only a guarantee of continued high oil prices will make a change. But if you combine non-foreign oil goals with low CO2 goal (if global warming scares you), the necessary capital investment and the lifestyle changes are going to be very painful and also very damaging to the economy.

As an engineer, I watch people pushing various schemes, and rarely do I see one that makes sense if you actually look at the numbers. Small cars, of course, save energy at the cost of lives – the EPA CAFE rules cost several thousand American lives per year. But the cost of energy is priced into our whole economy, and increasing that cost by mullahs, East Asian competition, taxes or forced technology conversion threatens to bring back the Nixon/Ford/Carter stagflation, but worse.

Apr 19, 2005 - 6:56 pm 13. erp:

Nuclear energy is the only way to get off oil.

Apr 19, 2005 - 7:03 pm 14. Buddy Larsen:

It’s just a cryin’ shame that we let junk-science shaman-politics wreck the nuclear energy industry. Good argument against democracy, right there!

Apr 19, 2005 - 7:12 pm 15. WichitaBoy:

What’s maddening about this is that there is no shortage of ideas about what to do.

Sorry, statements like that get my goat. Sure, there are plenty of ideas, all of them wrong or immensely impractical.

Here are some of the salient realities.

1) Reduction of consumption of energy = reduction of quality of life. Almost all the easy reductions have already been implemented.

2) A massive reduction in our consumption would have a minimal effect on Saudi Arabia.

3) We use a lot of energy; almost all of the ideas being touted as replacements for oil couldn’t possibly begin to satisfy our energy needs. The magnitude of the problem is seldom understood by optimistic editorial writers. Electric planes anyone?

It’s all laid out very clearly in Steven den Beste’s many articles on the subject which I linked to the last time we got on this subject.

When crunch time comes we will be forced to select from a limited menu of bad choices. Before that time is actually upon us we will do everything possible to avoid changing a thing. There are no magic bullets here and I’m personally tired of being led down the merry path by the NY Pied Piper.

Apr 19, 2005 - 7:38 pm 16. Charlie (Colorado):

The nice thing about all this is that it’s self-solving. When oil is too expensive, we’ll go to something else: nuclear, solar, etc. There are a bunch of those things right on the edge of being economical at current (near $50/bbl) oil prices.

Don’t like those, there are immense volumes of clathrates in the deep ocean, and there are methods of making oil and gasoline synthetically from the methane.

And don’t forget about oil sands.

$50/bbl oil also makes hybrids look more attractive, and while the current generation only get better mileage in city traffic, there’s a lot of city traffic around.

Apr 19, 2005 - 7:39 pm 17. Terrye:

Rick:

I don’t know what my next vehicle will be, I practically had to promise my Dad on his death bed that I would never buy a Ford.

as in found on the road dead.

Maybe we could use soy beans. It seems like you can do damn near anything with soy beans.

That is awful about the UAW pension.

Apr 19, 2005 - 7:53 pm 18. Luther McLeod:

Steven Den Beste (USS Clueless) wrote many excellent pieces on various alternate energy scenarios and their viability compared to oil use some time back. Most debunked any alternative other than nuclear. I agree. I think we must garner the maximum energy from the smallest particle of mass, that’s the only way to keep the wheel turning, long term. I believe those articles are still pertinent to this discussion. I apologize for the broad search term and the number of results, but, on the other hand, most anything the man wrote is worthwhile reading.

http://denbeste.nu/cgi-bin/perlfect/search/search.pl?p=1&lang=en&mode=any&q=alternate%2Benergy%2Bsources

I’m afraid I don’t know how to do the link thingy.

And, for those who may have noticed, I apologize for a previous inebriated post, I was embarrassed by it. It was a definite violation of the ‘Iron Fist’ rule. Search and ye shall find.

Apr 19, 2005 - 8:17 pm 19. Buddy Larsen:

Terrye, it won’t be a total dump, the big chiefs are either meeting, or have consented to meet, and do a ‘work-out’ that will amountr to some shaving of benefits in a spread-the-grief formula. Nobody will get hurt much (i know, what is ‘much’?) The harshest effect is on GM’s reputation as an intelligent and responsible corporate entity.

Right, on that gasoline-substitute chimera…nothing can or ever will approach the BTU performance in an internal comb. engine. Cheap hudrocarbons have built an unsustainable lifestyle…which fortunately will bring us back to neighborly togetherness as we Dagwood Bumstead carpool once again. Urbanites won’t be so hard hit in the personal transport changes, and country folk will ease back into a bit of truck gardening. Personal trasnsport is just the beginning. We’ll trend back toward 50s economics whether we like it or not, the system will quit concentrating and begin diffusing.

May not be so damn bad, in many ways. But at $5/gal gasolione, and less advantage to low-cost producers per distance from markets, things will be different. But not necessarily worse–if we can contain the oil wars short of grand-scale combat, or even shooting wars at all. Can be done, can be done. We do need to see to our politicians, though.

Apr 19, 2005 - 8:33 pm 20. Luther McLeod:

WichitaBoy

Sorry, I was composing while you were posting. You are correct, we have to look beyond the short term solutions, to hell with those quarterly numbers, give me 5, 10, 20 year numbers, and better. Roger is quite correct, we need an Apollo program, we need vision, we need something we can SELL.

“Sorry, statements like that get my goat. Sure, there are plenty of ideas, all of them wrong or immensely impractical.”

And, sure, I agree with with that statement, BOTOH, let the crazies, uhmm…tesla like… continue to come up with wild ideas…some of them might work?

Apr 19, 2005 - 8:46 pm 21. Mike_Nargizian:

Ummmm what about the Saudis Roger, lol!

Who do you think has sway in DC the Mullahs or the Saudis?

And it doesn’t even matter much anyway.. because with growing oil demand – India, China etc… oil demand is likely going to far outpace worldwide supply increase, which many think has now peaked ie… no more increase.

Apr 19, 2005 - 9:15 pm 22. Mike_Nargizian:

Charlie Colorado -

The nice thing about all this is that it’s self-solving. When oil is too expensive, we’ll go to something else: nuclear, solar, etc. There are a bunch of those things right on the edge of being economical at current (near $50/bbl) oil prices.

Not yet Charlie. Gas prices inflation adjusted are still very low… if/when they get higher than the sh** “might” start hitting the fan. But the people who really get squeezed are people who need to travel a lot for business… they get royally screwed.

$50/bbl oil also makes hybrids look more attractive, and while the current generation only get better mileage in city traffic, there’s a lot of city traffic around.

Charlie do you have that backwards? Significantly better highway mileage but no so much better city mileage?

Apr 19, 2005 - 9:29 pm 23. Mike_Nargizian:

Buddy and Gang Re Nucleur

I read and/or watched something that said Nucleur is whe most efficient energy source on the planet and that it is very safe now.

But I still remember Three Mile Island.

And the waste from it is pretty toxic stuff?

That being said if I lived near a nucleur plant or in any radius of it I’d still be nervous…. I remember after 9-11 people who lived near the big one in Rockland County outside of NYC were pretty nervous about it.

However, my friend who’s a nucleur scientist says that those places are impenetrable with a plane or missile?

OK but if that’s so then how would we theoretically take out the Mullah’s plants?

Apr 19, 2005 - 9:42 pm 24. ambisinistral:

i believe john moore hit the nail on the head. The amount of energy per dollar you get out of oil and gas make them far and away the best values.

Yea, it isn’t good giving money to the mullahs, but the US switching off oil wouldn’t keep other folks from buying it. Also, going to a considerabley less efficient energy source makes nary a bit of sense economically. The price of oil will have to raise considerably before the switch over, on a large scale, to an alternative energy source makes sense.

For the present all we can do is box the mullahs in as much as possible and see if we can’t push their regimes towards liberalization. Pretty much a Chinese finger trap no matter how you look at it.

Apr 19, 2005 - 9:51 pm 25. Wallace:

Those of us who make our living directly from oil and gas have wanted a coherent energy policy for decades. Higher prices are nice when you drill for and sell oil/gas…but much more important is the stability of prices.

Over the last 30 years domestic producers have been whipsawed by a series of high and then extremely low prices that have made long term planning impossible, i.e. trying to predict some sort of ROI. We would be drilling many more wells here in West Texas right now…if there were enough drilling rigs and “hands” to man them. There are not enough of either because so many people have been forced out of business in periods like the the mid 80’s and as recently as 1998 when oil hit a low of around $9/BBL. It didn’t even pay to pump it out of the ground at that price.

Dubya Bush should know the drill. He was in the same business I’m in now in the same place, Midland Texas. In fact, my wife was his secretary when he was a small independent oilman!

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:01 pm 26. OlCoot:

Energy research comprises a significant part of my day. It’s not, or wasn’t, my field of expertise, but as a plant engineer for an energy intensive manufacturer here in Southern California, I have to stay ontop of it. We pay around twice the national average for electricity and are in the process of generating our own. It just may not be a given that nuclear is the next course of action, though it should stay on the table and be a potential high priority.

There is an alternative source that’s not getting much play in the American press, but according to the USGS, the amount of methane hydrate in the ocean deeps is staggering:

“Hydrates store immense amounts of methane, with major implications for energy resources and climate, but the natural controls on hydrates and their impacts on the environment are very poorly understood.

Gas hydrates occur abundantly in nature, both in Arctic regions and in marine sediments. Gas hydrate is a crystalline solid consisting of gas molecules, usually methane, each surrounded by a cage of water molecules. It looks very much like water ice. Methane hydrate is stable in ocean floor sediments at water depths greater than 300 meters, and where it occurs, it is known to cement loose sediments in a surface layer several hundred meters thick.

The worldwide amounts of carbon bound in gas hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth.

A pair of relatively small areas, each about the size of the State of Rhode Island, shows intense concentrations of gas hydrates. USGS scientists estimate that these areas contain more than 1,300 trillion cubic feet of methane gas, an amount representing more than 70 times the 1989 gas consumption of the United States. Some of the gas was formed by bacteria in the sediments, but some may be derived from deep strata of the Carolina Trough. The Carolina Trough is a significant offshore oil and gas frontier area where no wells have been drilled. It is a very large basin, about the size of the State of South Carolina, that has accumulated a great thickness of sediment, perhaps more than 13 kilometers. Salt diapirs, reefs, and faults, in addition to hydrate gas, may provide greater potential for conventional oil and gas traps than is present in other east coast basins.”

Apologies for the lengthy quote. This hasn’t received much play in the US press, but others have noticed. The Guardian, while being both snarky and handwringing is, at least, ontop of it.

“More than a mile below the choppy Gulf of Mexico waters lies a vast, untapped source of energy. Locked in mysterious crystals, the sediment beneath the seabed holds enough natural gas to fuel America’s energy-guzzling society for decades, or to bring about sufficient climate change to melt the planet’s glaciers and cause catastrophic flooding, depending on whom you talk to.

No prizes for guessing the US government’s preferred line. This week it will dispatch a drilling vessel to the region, on a mission to bring this virtually inexhaustible new supply of fossil fuel to power stations within a decade.

The ship will hunt for methane hydrates, a weird combination of gas and water produced in the crushing pressures deep within the earth – literally, ice that burns.

The stakes could not be higher: scientists reckon there could be more valuable carbon fuel stored in the vast methane hydrate deposits scattered under the world’s seabed and Arctic permafrost than in all of the known reserves of coal, oil and gas put together. ”

Sparing you further quotes, I’ll offer this link to this article that says, at least for the Northern Gulf of Mexico, methane hydrate isn’t there.

The truth of the matter is, natural gas production on the North American continent has peaked, that’s why we’re currently building Liquified Natural Gas facilities at our ports…we’re going to have to start importing the stuff. Global oil production has also peaked, although I doubt you’ll get a straight admission from Opec that they simply can’t produce anymore than they already are.

The greenies are sure to be up in arms when they find out that we’re considering sucking up MH deposits from the ocean floor, as methane is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than is CO2.

Now, let’s tie this back to the UN. Since prior to the Reagan administration, the UN has been clamoring for the passage and ratification of LOST or Law of the Sea Treaty. Reagan wanted no part of it, due to its tenets of wealth redistribution and taxation, one has to wonder why GWB is urging Congress to ratify it. Of course, as a lower case ‘l’ libertarian conservative, I’ve wondered about a great many things GWB is trying to do.

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:23 pm 27. Buddy Larsen:

So true, Wallace. Good hands all over the gulf coast bailed when the rigs stacked last time around on those $9 & 10 prices. Sabine Pass had so much iron stacked–200 rigs?–that they just quit maintaining it and a lotta the old barge rigs and a few jack-ups just junked. Now, Kerr McGee, just for one example, just a few weeks ago, in one fell swoop, *doubled* a day rate on one of their floaters (i believe it was)–and it took. All that junk iron in the Pass coulda been producing ‘heal’ but instead is just write-off. And, it’s all just idiotic DC posturing.

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:29 pm 28. Mike_Nargizian:

BUSH IS PUSING FOR RATIFICATION OF IT?

Why would that be? His big oil connections and/or the Saudis?

Not sure what you mean?

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:36 pm 29. OlCoot:

Dang, links were stripped…sorry folks.

USGS http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html

Refuation of MH in the Northern Gulf of Mexico http://www.allamericanpatriots.com/m-news+article+storyid-8454-PHPSESSID-005fd731c751e790f43c144c391e10a0.html

Guardian Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1451542,00.html

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:39 pm 30. Buddy Larsen:

OlCoot, great stuff on the methane ice. The LOS treaty is involved in a nasty spat, that can only get worse, between China and Japan over several oil & gas potential areas in the South China Sea. I don’t know, but would guess, that Taiwan, and its location astride the sea approaches to Japan from the Persian Gulf, are all troubling the administration greatly.

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:41 pm 31. Buddy Larsen:

One of two or maybe three tiny atoll chains that are in several territorial sea claims–that only treaty can solve–are the “Spratleys”. Google that one word and the whole story will no doubt unfold.

Apr 19, 2005 - 10:48 pm 32. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Re: Clathrates

Clathrates are an apparent huge supply of carbon fuel. We also have vast amounts of coal in the US, and oil sands in Canada.

One problem (or non-problem) is the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere. Although the “science” of global warming is pathetic, at some level of CO2 the effect will show up. We have raised CO2 from the 250 ppm to 365ppm (from memory – a bit off no doubt) since 1850, which is quite a bit. If we raise it to 500 or 1000, what happens to the earth’s albedo – i.e. do we get global warming?

The answer is: probably (or we prevent an ice age – whatever). So carbon fuels carry an external cost that may eventually have to be paid. Clathrates also have yet to be proven as to either their extent or their cost of utilization. It will be interesting to see.

BTW… if you burn them, you don’t release methane into the atmosphere, but CO2, currently still a minor greenhouse gas. Of course, if you transport even more methane around than we do already, more is lost to leakage.

Nuclear can help, but doesn’t provide transportation. A century of work on electric cars has yet to produce a battery (the only real problem) capable of adequate range, and battery breakthroughs are not that frequent – so Nuclear->electric car is unlikely. Here in Arizona it takes 5kW just to cool your car! Some propose nuclear->electric->hydrogen as a way to provide mobile energy, but that has poor energy efficiency and requires incredibly expensive retooling of the infrastructure.

I wonder if fuel cells using carbon-based fuels, with reforming and capture of the carbon might be a useful approach. But this is easy for me to wonder about, since I don’t know anything about the chemistry or thermodynamics of it. And that’s the problem with most energy ideas – the real numbers that come from detailed analysis show them to be impractical or so minor an improvement as to be not worthwhile.

Apr 19, 2005 - 11:41 pm 33. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

One more comment – with my engineer’s hat on.

The vast progress in technology makes it seem to the non-technologist that all it takes is an “initiative” or “emphasis” or spending to make a new desired technology successful.

In reality, in most cases it is more akin to pushing a rope. It ain’t gonna work no matter how hard you try. The best example of this is the battery problem for electric cars – lots of pushing, lots of knots, little progress. And in many areas, expecting a breakthrough isn’t rational – strong physical principals put absolute upper bounds on how successful they can be (anyone know what they are on a chemical battery? I don’t).

There are good reasons that most of the technology we use is old. It is easy to be dazzled by the areas of major progress – electronics especially – and miss those where little changes. But an electric motor is the same as it has been for a century (except for load-factor adjusting circuits).

Apr 19, 2005 - 11:47 pm 34. ed:

Hmmm.

Basically we’re stuck in a economic deadlock. The only that can break this deadlock is a revolutionary technology that can either cheaply liberate hydrogen from water, produce synthetic oil from garbage or bioengineer some plant to do either.

Apr 20, 2005 - 5:17 am 35. Knucklehead:

John Moore, Witchita, et. al,

My favorite Piss and Moan along these lines is, “We need a new Manhattan Project to find a viable replacement for oil!”

I just love that one. Yo, I may be a knucklehead of the first order, but didn’t we already have a Manhattan Project, isn’t the deficit spending from that project long since all paid off, and didn’t it show us the way to run big, honking power plants without oil?

Maybe what we really need is a Manhattan Project sized effort to ’splain the basics of how “energy” is produced and consumed to the Vast, Didn’t Pay Any Attention Whatsoever in Science Class Conspiracy.

There are only a couple ways to significantly reduce pertroleum consumption:

- reduce lifestyle (of course the other guy always has to go first in this game or nobody wants to play)

- use other fuel sources for power plants (new-kew-lar, new-kew-lar!)

We’ll get some of both eventually.

Apr 20, 2005 - 6:16 am 36. thibaud:

There isn’t a perfect energy solution, but the best (or least bad) option has nuclear at its core. This option has the great advantage of being favored now by greens and hawks alike.

What’s standing in the way? Could it be the fact that our energy policy-making process is dominated by congressmen and executive officials of both parties who come from states like Louisiana, Wyoming, Texas?

NUKES NOW. Subsidize new construction of nuclear plants, and also American-made hybrid cars, with a national gasoline tax of maybe 50 cents/gal. This would hugely benefit low-income drivers who shifted to hybrids and also give a boost to Ford and GM, who otherwise will be sliding toward bankruptcy within 10 years. Win-Ford and GM could also develop hybrid trucks, which would easily dominate anything the Japanese can come up with due to the tariff. Win-win all around.

Apr 20, 2005 - 7:28 am 37. Steven Mitchell:

Near as I can tell, TVA is quietly modernizing existing plants and bringing reactors out of mothballs. In some places, they were running 1/4 capacity until very recently. Considering that TVA produces low cost energy locally and supplies surplus to the grid, this is not a small thing.

I don’t have a news reports, as this is local to me.

Apr 20, 2005 - 9:02 am 38. Knucklehead:

Thibaud,

NUKES NOW. Subsidize new construction of nuclear plants, and also American-made hybrid cars, with a national gasoline tax of maybe 50 cents/gal. This would hugely benefit low-income drivers who shifted to hybrids and also give a boost to Ford and GM, who otherwise will be sliding toward bankruptcy within 10 years. Win-Ford and GM could also develop hybrid trucks, which would easily dominate anything the Japanese can come up with due to the tariff. Win-win all around.

While I certainly believe the US should move toward nuclear fuel for power plants and willing to listen to any case that this should be subsidized (or even owned by the federal government as national infrastructure) through a tax on gasoline specifically targetted for the purpose, and that this subsidy should be extended to US auto manufacturers for the development of hybrid or even hydrogen fuel cell powered autos and/or trucks, I fail to see how this would “hugely benefit low-income drivers”.

Gasoline is somewhere near its “all time” high price per gallon. This cost is especially burdensome to “low-income drivers” who, presumably, need to spend a larger portion of their income on gasoline than a “high-income” driver does. If “low-income drivers” are being pushed toward bankruptcy by the relatively high-cost of gasoline how does immediately increasing the price of gasoline through a larger federal tax on gasoline help these low-income drivers stave off impending bankruptcy at all, let alone provide them “huge benefit”?

If such a plan were passed and put into effect by the end of 2005, how long would it take for a significant level of power to be generated by nuke plants? Three years, five, ten? I’d guess ten years of serious effort before we’d make a 30 or 40% impact in petroleum use for power generation. How long before these US hybrid cars are developed and on the market? Two years, three? Are we also going to subsidize the purchase of these vehicles? If they cost 15% (pulling a number out of my ample butt) more to purchase than a comparable non-hybrid) how would that help low-income drivers who, normally as far as I know, are more likely to purchase used autos. How does it help them to send their low-income to GMAC rather than Exxon? If it takes two or three years for viable product to hit the market and another two or three or four years for a sufficient inventory of “pre-owned” vehicles to start hitting the used car market place and you’ve taxed the heck outta gasoline for those 4 or 5 or 6 or more years until these low-income drivers can start to gain some benefit, what favors have you done them?

In addition to the notion of a “Manhattan Project” to reduce petroleum consumption I always get a big kick out of the notion of a “gas guzzler tax”. Who do people think is paying more tax dollars into the various gas taxes: those driving “gas guzzlers” or those driving greeniemobiles? Who gets better gas mileage: gas powered autos or diesel powered autos? Who pays more per gallon?

The tax system for petro products is a mess. Maybe it is time for the people of the US to start paying more gas taxes. Maybe its time for us to revisit what we should own as national infrastructure or what we should subsidize the building and/or operation and/or purchase of. But please don’t try to pawn off a large federal gasoline tax as something that would yield huge benefits to poor people. No poor person needs the price of something essential to them driven up 20% by a federal tax.

Apr 20, 2005 - 9:02 am 39. thibaud:

Knuck – they receive more in subsidies for their hybrid purchase than they pay in increased gas expenses.

Assume your typical 20,000/miles per year low-income driver in Calif, for ex., may get maybe at most 25 miles to the gallon on average, as most are driving older cars whose efficiency sucks.

So low-income drivers need ca 800 gallons per year @ $2.50/gal = $2,000 per year in out-of-pocket, non-dedictible expense for consumers whose disposable income isn’t more than a few thousand dollars per year, if that.

If these drivers can get 60 miles to the gallon with a hybrid, then, assuming an increase in gas price to $3.00/gal, the above consumer would spend 333 gals x $3 = $1000 per year on gas. $1000 savings there.

Of course the hybrid purchase would cost them out of pocket, but the hybrid subsidy could be used to defray the first year’s payments– maybe eliminate them entirely. Right now the hybrid subsidy right now is several thousand $ per car, which could easily be increased to maybe $5,000 per car if you raised another $50B through a national $0.50/gal tax.

So the benefits to the poor aren’t just in lower gas expense but in getting them into new, state-of-the-art cars that are vastly superior to their 20 year-old ramshackle Dodge Spirits etc. Pride, responsibility, perhaps increased aspirations and a willingness to work hard to satisfy them: I’d say these benefits, collectively, merit the modifier “huge.”

Apr 20, 2005 - 10:48 am 40. Kyda Sylvester:

My father, not a man given to conspiracy theories or flights of fantasy, spent most of his life in the higher echelons of the automobile industry. Once, years ago, when we both were a bit in our “cups” and having a long serious conversation, he told me that they’ve had the ability to make highly fuel efficient cars for quite a long time as well as viable replacements for internal combustion engines that run on fuel sources other than oil (didn’t elaborate). I asked him how anything like that could possibly be kept under wraps. He just looked at me and, nodding his head, said “The bodies are buried everywhere”. It’s possibly the oddest conservation I ever had with my dad and I’ve never quite known what to make of it.

Apr 20, 2005 - 3:22 pm 41. Buddy Larsen:

One hears these things. Never know what to make of it, either. A brief runthru of the Kennedy Assassination oddities is enough to open a whole ‘nother, very dark, universe.

Apr 20, 2005 - 4:54 pm 42. j.pickens:

I am so sick and tired of these hybrid car proponents!

The Lithium ion batteries in the hybrid cars take more energy to produce than they will ever cause to be saved in gasoline consumption in the hybrids.

How are the Lithium batteries made? With lots and lots of electricity. Where does this electricity come from? Coal and Oil in Japan and PRC China.

Anyone who thinks they are “saving” energy by driving a hybrid car is stupid beyond belief!!!!

Apr 20, 2005 - 10:28 pm 43. M. Simon:

There is a reason that one nuke equivalent of wind will get installed this year while no new nukes will get built.

It has nothing to do with environmental religion.

It has to do with capitalism:

Wind is now cheaper than natural gas for electricity production.

In 5 to 15 years it will be cheaper than coal.

Mr. DenBeste (who is not an energy engineer) was right about a lot of things. Wind energy wasn’t one of them.

Apr 21, 2005 - 2:24 am 44. Knucklehead:

Thibaud,

Your calculations are fine if they could be implemented instantaneously. But nobody waves any magic wands and has nuclear power plants and US manufactured hybrids on line in a matter of months. It is a matter of years and you’re talking about a plan that would impose costs on those least able to afford them for years before they reap the benefits. That’s the fundamental problem low-income people have – they can’t absorb cost today for ROI tomorrow.

Apr 21, 2005 - 6:44 am

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