Suicidal US energy policies
 

This Victor Davis Hansen article says it best to me:

https://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson120406.html

Yes, very well said with no slants.

I needed to rewrite this...

1.) Politicians suck
2.) They only listen to the public to get re-election material
3.) Yes, we are addicted to oil. Yes, we can do something about it. Yet, we will not do anything until those in executive power no longer have a financial or vested (i.e. influence of power) in the very industry we are trying to distance ourselves from.
4.) Just as in obtaining fuel economy, our withdrawal from oil has no silver bullet, but a multi-angle effective front using biofuels, hydrogen, wind, thermal, EV, etc can at least alleviate the burden of 6 billion people attempting to drink from the dark fountain at the same time.
5.) See #1.
Mak

Hello? Isn't it the "people" in power which cause(d) these problems? "Pogo" said it best..."We have met the enemy. and he is us!" Grim? Isn't there another "m" on this? "Grimm"...as in fairy tales? It's all a big game, people! :D
P.s. I'm in central NC, too...Chatham Co.

What the hell are we doing?
 

This article sunk in over the past few days. I don't follow current events very closely so the details I cannot attest to be true, but zooming back to oh, say Mars and taking a look at what's going on I see this:

1) Buy buying oil, we are sending lots money directly to those countries that have popular anti-american views - and it's been this way for some time.
2) Countries that profit heavily from oil are not all that much better off than if they did not have oil. There is as much poverty, opression, infighting and violence, probably more than if there was no oil.
3) US interest in foreign countries over the years in fact does seem to slant to those countries that have oil or control over oil. The gov't is just trying to keep us rolling along. But these countries seem to have never ending battles and wars that we get sucked in to.
4) Oil finances so many problems for Americans and people in the countries we buy it from, it makes global warming seem like just a bad aftertaste.
5) There must be a good side to buying oil, but it doesn't get any press.
6) Bottom line: Oil does alot of harm it also does alot of good otherwise we would't want it. We have to be smart where we buy, how we buy and how we use oil.

DaX -

... danger, my political POV below YPPOVMV ...

I wouldn't say it wasn't slanted, but I do think it is a very good real-politic statement. I didn't agree with the portrayal of Chavez. Personally, I like Chavez because I know that the Latin American socio-economic model of 90% poor and 10% super rich is the model that "our rich" would like to impose on the USA. You can argue that Chavez is not democratic, but that has never stopped the USA from cozying up to a foreign leader (i.e. 1980's era Saddam) in the past. Conversely, you can make an argument that Chavez is helping the poor of Venezuela.

There is a very deep irony that the article is pointing out. When oil was $20/barrel, Chavez was weak because Venezuelan oil reserves are expensive to extract. He just didn't have much money and Venezuela was saddled with the traditional 3rd world IMF/World Bank "loan shark" debt. I have read that the "price point" for Venezuelan oil is $50/barrel. At $50, Venezuelan oil becomes very viable in the world market and Chavez can afford to "spread the wealth". bush foreign policy is the best thing that ever happened to Chavez and also the reason that Latin American countries are voting in leftists.

Apologies in advance if I am being too political.

Lefty CarloSW2

For that matter, bush policy is the Iraq insurgency's best weapon against us and the Iraqi people. It makes one question the ultimate motives behind such failed policy. Maybe this is just a HUGE smoke screen so Exxon can pump Iraq oil w/o a meter.

The US would have to cut consumption by about 2/3 to eliminate foreign oil imports. Not a snowballs chance in hell.

Of course we won't have any choice once Peak Oil hits - like it or not we'll not only be in greater competition with ourselves for the oil we can buy but in competition with every other country in the world.

Biodiesel
 

I've been deeply interested in renewable energy for many years, most particularly biofuels. I've put some numbers together on biodiesel. These were my two sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algacul...sel_production
https://www.rubyesque.com/biofuels/biodiesel.html

We'd need 52.5M acres of land devoted to palm oil production to completely replace diesel with biodiesel made from palm oil. Taking the low end of the algae estimates (that algae would produce 7x the yield of palm oil), we'd need only 7.5M acres devoted to growing algae in order to completely replace diesel with biodiesel. That's a hell of a lot of land, yes, but consider this: We currently use 943M acres of land for food production in the US. We'd need just 0.8% of that land to grow enough algae to completely replace diesel fuel.

0.8% is trivial. All we need is the political will.

Most people don't know that biodiesel can also be used to replace oil used in home heating furnaces.

Biodiesel doesn't do anything to reduce gasoline use, however. For that, butanol looks promising. It's a pretty darn good straight replacement for gasoline, much better than ethanol. (Ethanol is a complete joke, imo, especially when made from corn.) I don't have any hard numbers for that argument yet though.

Imagine what the $250+ billion we've spent in Iraq could have accomplished on the biofuel front.

Lefty Carlos - it's sad that I can figure out what this says. :p

-Right-as-rain Matt :D