Check Your Figures, Al
For that little gain, I’m not willing to suffer the pain of a $3 chocolate creme-filled Dunkin’ Donut.
Driving is as American as apple pie. At more than 9m barrels a day, gasoline accounts for almost half of US oil demand, and more than a 10th of that of the world. Capitol Hill wants to curb this. Use of biofuels, mainly ethanol, is to be expanded five-fold to 2.4m b/d by 2022. In addition, new cars must achieve
35 miles per gallon by 2020, up from 21 mpg today.
Will it make a difference in 10 years? Ethanol provides only two-thirds the energy gasoline does, and the dominant corn-based variety requires a lot of energy to make. So the extra 1.3m b/d of ethanol possibly on the market by 2017 would actually displace only 700,000 b/d of gasoline consumption.
And I can’t imagine what the corn to feed Bingley’s fat little heifers is gonna run.
Gorebal Warming | Mr. Bingley | 
February 25, 2008 10:29 am
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Capitalism is dying.
Politicians speak so freely about telling us what fuel to buy, what insurance to buy, mandating insurance coverage, etc.
The cold war is over. We lost. Kruschev is burying us.
Hey, maybe it was slippers he was pounding the table with…
(It’s not every blog that has its very own Eeyore… Cheer up, Skyler.)
I’m trying but there really is so little hope for freedom and capitalism. We’re on the road to serfdom, ala Hayek, and there seems to be no exit.
The republicans, as loathsome as any political party is, at least had a brief time in the 80’s that seemed to offer hope, but that is gone. Long gone. There is no one out there offering to bring that hope back, or even bothering to pretend to bring it back. The 80’s were my formative years and deluded me into thinking that the political process might work.
It’s all quite depressing.
Hey – did you guys happen to catch the latest from Science on this? I haven’t had time to write much of anything up this past week, so I pass it to you, with my compliments.
Oh – and it’s not hardly recent news, either. They’ve been ignoring this guy since before it was fashionable to ignore this guy.
Well, look at the bright side, Skyler. If Iran develops nukes, and the long range missiles to deliver ’em, we’ll still have that all out nuclear war (so artfully dodged back in the Cold War), egged on by Russia and China, with the end result that all civilization is obliterated, and the ragged survivors of humanity survive through wits, violence, and the occasional bout of cannibalism.
See? Things could be worse.
Thanks JeffS. You make me feel SO much better.
As I tell Sis, “Live to serve, serve to live!”
Oy. Why, why, whyyyy did you get me all amped up? It’s morning, y’all!
I can’t. Can’t even. This whole thing is a mess.
Increased Ethanol use not only jacks up the price of food (as we’re seeing already) but also takes up waaaay more farmland than can be spared (TAKE THAT, HIPPEHS!). It also puts the spotlight on something that is non-efficient and treats it like a panacea — which it is NOT. Neither are solar nor wind energy.
Meanwhile, we haven’t built a new oil refinery in the US in something like 30 years, despite many of them being taken out by hurricane Katrina, thus decreasing our dometic oil production even further. We should be focused on building MORE refineries, exploring new DOMESTIC sources of oil and making oil easier to get — not harder (Skyler’s “capitalism is dying” argument comes into play here). Instead, we’re sticking our heads in the sand and bemoaning the “oil shortage” while pursuing solutions that don’t work — cardinal among them the LUDICROUS C.A.F.E. standards Bush just pushed that will finally KILL the American car industry for good. (GMAC just came out with it’s biggest profits loss numbers for last year — biggest in the history or the industry.)
Add to all this the fact that the majority of our oil comes from Canada and Mexico (probably why we pursue open borders with Mexico so fiercely, they’ve got us by the balls) and that we are literally one of the cleanest countries on the face of the earth and I just don’t know anymore. My head gets all fuzzy and things start to get blurred.
China, Africa and South America are the biggest polluters in the world. But I don’t see any wind farms being built there, or any environmentalists calling for embargoes on them, do you?
At this point, I’m thinking nuclear powered cars are the answer. Someone figures that out, I’m first in line.
I want that Jetsons lifestyle, too!
How soon before they start promoting this as a weapon in the War! On! Obesity!? ‘Cos if you can’t afford food, you can’t overeat, now, can you?
And if they make us walk everywhere, because there’s no oil, and the precious precious fuel has to be saved for the politicians and Hollywood elite, we’ll all get slimmer.
Bah. The news this week is making me want to build a Unabomber-style cabin in the woods. (Except without, you know, actually doing violence to people. ‘Cos ricki don’t play that.)