23 Saturday Feb 2013
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That is, of course, the average — which means it’s more if you have to use your car a lot, or need a truck or van for work or hauling kids. Explains the huge increase in popularity of motorcycles and scooters in urban environs.
Last time gasoline sucked up this much of the household budget was 1983, when the nation was still recovering from the gas crisis.
But then again, he told you energy prices would “necessarily skyrocket” under his plan.
19 Thursday Apr 2012
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Remember how awful it was that George Bush wouldn’t change his mind about the Iraq War (or whatever else was irking the Democrats at the time?) He was stubborn and arrogant…but apparently when Barrack Obama does the same thing — stick to his guns in the face of a majority of the country disagreeing with him it’s showing strength and leadership.
In this case, it’s the president’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge the necessity of the Keystone XL pipeline. The Republicans have amended approval of the thing onto the Transportation Bill coming down the line, but — in a move that would surprise no one that’s watched the president for the last three years — Obama is vowing to veto the bill.
The pipeline would bring thousands of jobs (that aspect that the president is “focused like a laser” on), would reduce oil and gas prices in the United States (something the people want, but the politicians aren’t so thrilled by), and which would have minimal effect on the environment (Don’t believe it? There are hundreds of pipelines going through the same area that haven’t affected the aquifer — it’s a crap claim by environmentalists that oppose any energy production.)
Einstein defined insanity as “Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome.” Obama may not be insane, but his intransigence is certainly arrogant and destructive.
If there’s any reason to can the Transportation Bill, it would be yet another assault on our freedoms tucked into the mix: the provision to allow the IRS to seize your passport and refuse you exit from the country if they think you owe taxes…without due process.
03 Tuesday Apr 2012
Posted in Energy
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File this under “Great work, champ!” I’m sure glad the president is making energy a priority in his administration…or is he “focused like a laser?” Oh, wait, that’s the jobs thing. Like the tens of thousands lost for nixing the Keystone XL pipeline, the same reason Canadian crude is about to get more expensive.
I’m sure PetroChina’s willing to buy all those “dirty” oil sands crude that were already being drilled. (For the thinking impaired environut — that means the pipeline being stopped doesn’t stop the drilling.)
27 Tuesday Mar 2012
The president would have us believe that the rise in gas prices in the United States is just a factor of the international oil market, and that is certainly true — gas prices in Europe are shooting up, as well: in Britain, gas jumped to an average $8.06/gallon in the past month. Progessives would have Americans believe that this is a good excuse for us to shut up and take the price hikes…after all, Europe has high prices (and everything Europe is rad…the kid, they still say, “rad”, right?)
Wrong. Part of the reason for the spike is greater demand in the developing nations — China and India. Part of it is the usual speculation and market gambling over the latest Iranian posturing and the idiotic response from the United States over the Straits of Hormuz. But quite a bit of it has to do with the current administration’s policies, which are choking American production.
The president loves to tell us we’re putting out more oil than ever before…and it was true four years ago. But not now. The administration took advantage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to chop permit approvals for offshore drilling. Permits on federal lands: down.
Some refineries have shut down for maintenance, an unavoidable situation. But other refineries are shutting down all over the East Coast because the companies cannot make enough money on producing fuel, and this reduced capacity is seriously affecting the prices of fuel. How could making fuel not be fiscally practical, when we are told over and over again that Americans use too much of the stuff? The answer is buried in the details of the story: Sunoco, Conocco, and Hess cannot make enough money because of the environmental regulations for low-sulfur diesel (also, essentially, home heating oil — brace yourself for next winter, Northeast!) that major markets have been legislating. Moving fuel from more distant refineries is impractical; we don’t have the pipeline and storage facilities to handle the load — which makes moves like stopping the Keystone XL pipeline look that much more moronic.
Additionally, regulations that mandate different fuel blends for winter and summer months require retooling of refineries — an expensive process that is a prime culprit behind the “driving season” spike in prices (which have yet to hit, America…better buy a scooter.)
And gas prices are not the only instance of ideologically-motivated insanity in the energy production market. The Environmental Protection Agency is set to unleash their new CO2 and “greenhouse gas” regulations on the electricity-producing industry. Specifically, the collection of enviro-nuts at the EPA (who, to be fair, don’t care about the environment; they care about power) will require any new power plants to emit less than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt. That’s okay for natural gas (and T Boone Pickens.) They emit 800 or so pounds of CO2 per megawatt. Coal plants — where we get most of our electricity from — emit an average of 1,768 pounds per megawatt.
And before you applaud the EPA, let’s take you back to that high school biology class you slept through: carbon dioxide is necessary to the life cycle of plants. Let’s make it simple: CO2+water+sunlight=more plants…which produce oxygen. They also tend to like heat…so even if global warming is your concern, more heat means melting ice caps and more water vapor in the air, add more CO2 and that gives you…more plants. Example: you used to be able to grow grapes in Scotland during the medieval period. Greenland was actually green when it was warmer (and not due to those gas-guzzling Viking longboats, either…)
And more plants mean more oxygen. Right now, the plants are winning this one: the atmosphere is 21% O2, and less than .4% CO2. It’s hardly an emergency that requires the collapse of the American economy, but what does require that last bit are the statist dreams of Progressive politicians, who hope to lord it over a massive swathe of poor Americans. This is why there is always a reason to oppose some form of energy: environmentalists tout wind, then complain about losing ground squirrel habitats or birds dying in the propellers of the plants; they tout natural gas, then go after fracking; they tout hydroelectric then turn around and complain about the reduced river capacities; solar will eventually get the same treatment — large scale plants will harm [enter animal] habitats in the Southwest and homeowners associations will complain about the aesthetics.
None of this was unanticipated. It was the point of the exercise, as the president told the San Francisco Chronicle in January of 2008:
“…Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers…”
The president and his cabal want higher energy prices. It makes their buddies wealthy and impoverishes the rest of the country…requiring us to rely on them for relief, hence insuring their positions and power. They dream themselves the new aristocracy, and they’ve created a world-wide crisis catastrophe! to excuse their actions: climate change.
This load of bollocks has been banging around as an excuse for “action” since 1992, when the United Nations got involved. As the Cold War wound down, the money stopped flowing from the superpowers — what is a poor international organization to do? Or the scientists soon to be put out of work by declining nuclear research budgets? Enter climate change… Here’s the problem: we’ve only got solid data for 30 years — not even a tick of a clock in the depths of geological time. Secondly, there’s been no warming in the last decade — a little bit of data that conveniently gets left out everything the warming alarmists are preaching on the television. Point of fact, there’s been less than a degree (Celsius) in warming since the Little Ace Age of the 1800s. Extreme weather events? There’s not more of them, it just looks that way because the 24 hour news cycle fills time with disasters — disasters get eyes and that sells ad time.
But what about the unusually warm winter this year? Can you remember the average temperature and the weird spikes that happen from year to year — no, you don’t; so you see unusual activity because it’s outside of the compiled experience you have (i.e. Winter is cold and snowy — so having a day or two of warm weather in the middle of late winter/almost spring is unusual! Except it’s not.) “Large fluctuations from warm to cold winters have been the rule for the U.S., as one can see from records kept by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. For example, the winters of 1932 and 1934 were as warm as or warmer than the 2011-2012 one and the winter of 1936 was much colder.” And they all had weird spikes of cold and hot. New Mexico has seen temperatures in the 30s as late as early summer. Is it unusual? Yep. Is it a cause for building an underground bunker and waiting for the Second Coming? Nope.
It’s certainly not a reason to hamstring the economy with more regulations, and risk people dying of the cold (which happens a lot more than dying of heat) because fuel is too bloody expensive. We need to drill and refine more petrol products, get more natural gas, more wind and solar (where it works well.) And that means we need to turf Obama and his crew over the side, sharpish.
20 Tuesday Mar 2012
On that whole gas price inflation thing? Hey, he’s only got so many instruments to deal with that (and one is usually in his hand), so he gives himself an A for dealing with fuel prices.
This is the problem with oligarchs — they’re incompetent and arrogant, and usually to study to know it.
13 Tuesday Mar 2012
this was taken near the White House:
And funnily, Energy Secretary Steven Chu is doing a little two-step on his desire to hike American gas prices up to parity with European markets to force a move to immature and expensive energy forms. Right off the bat you know this guy is of questionable quality — he’s got a Nobel Prize. I think you get ‘em in every box of “Progressivism Bites” cereal (no sugars!)
This prize-winning idiot should recognize that the United States has different fuel expenditure needs from Europe — he’s from Missouri. Once you’re outside the east coast, things get a bit…vast. Hell, the nearest cities to Albuquerque, where I live, are Santa Fe and Socorro (and the latter is pushing it to define it was a city) — and they’re both an hour at the state’s 75 mph highway speeds. And with the plummeting approval polls on the president firmly tied to the gas prices, it seems the secretary is willing to eat crow.
“I no longer share that view,” Chu said in response to questioning from Sen. Mike Lee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It’s obvious prevarication, as this is the same tool who a few weeks ago smugly told the committee that “we’re not working on that” when asked about the rising gas prices. (Interetingly, the Politico is carrying administration water, having removed the quote from this article and replaced it with a sycophantic “explanation” of their “error.”)
There’s been a lot of hemming and hawing to explain how it’s not the policies of the adminsitration, but rather international demand that are causing the jumps in prices. Here’s where they’re wrong:
Domestic exploration has been stunted: at least 103 permits are in regulatory limbo right now. No new drilling plans have been approved since the permitorium went up after the BP spill. The 2012-2017 Outer Continental Shelf Program has placed a seven-year ban on drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico. In addition to preventing exploration that would bolster supply and create jobs, the permitorium is also costing the government $3.7 million in lost revenue per day according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) from royalties. If that holds, the federal government would lose more than $1.35 billion from royalty payments, just this year.
So, decreased supply, lost job and revenue…yup, this is top-notch government planning in action.
22 Wednesday Feb 2012
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[Sorry, I was loving the aliteration on the title.]
The 2008 spike in gas prices was a disaster due to failed energy policies, but the steady climb and recent spike of the same…well, that’s “progress” according to our craptastic leader. Yes, we’re supposed to feel better about the shot to your wallet because “…domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low…” Um…so bloody what? It’s no coincidence that, in addition to the global demand rising (while domestic demand is down 5% from last year), the administration has hamstrung us with heavy impediments to domestic production by ”slow-walking offshore permits, killing the Keystone XL pipeline, making it even harder to get oil out of federal lands….Instead of aggressively expanding oil production, he offered a set of ridiculous alternatives — hugely wasteful “green” energy subsidies, a call for a million electric cars by 2014 and costly fuel economy mandates that won’t make a dent in consumption for decades.”
It’s your regulations and taxation, coupled with ludicrous monetary policies, that are way gas is spiking, champ. You own it; now take your lumps.
21 Tuesday Feb 2012
Posted in Politics
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Another day, another Jay Carney prevarication…save this time it’s a doozy. The Obama administration is about to take a serious punch in the face from $4+ gas prices, and to try and offset some of the damage, Carney is blaming…Republicans.
Well, the Republican governor of Nebraska, right now, claiming the governor asked for the Keystone XL pipeline to be rerouted to preserve the water table. Never mind there are several dozen pipelines running through the exact same location. That’s when he wasn’t trying to slough it off on the State Department, which did the review. No — the impetus to can the pipeline came not from the Nebraska state government, but from anti-shale oil advocates (never mind it’s being mined in Canada) and the president has steadfastly refused to allow common sense or the suffering of the American people to get in the way of his ideology — hence the unofficial permitorium on Gulf offshore drilling, the shutdown of several refineries (some are offline for cleaning; they are dirty things), and his EPA is pushing regulations that will curtail coal-fired electricity generation.
It’s a sign of the times that Carney feels comfortable enough to lie so openly it makes him appear ridiculous.
15 Wednesday Feb 2012
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The media have been preparing us for this for years by continually floating this meme…but this time we might get it. Why? Firstly, the president’s naive, fantasy-driven policies that rest on notion that “green” energy is mature enough to take the place of more energy dense, hence cheaper per unit of energy, sources like nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil.
We’ve less refinery capacity, less exploration and harvesting of oil in the Gulf of Mexico (but we’ll gladly subsidize Brazilian production…apparently environment issues don’t matter, so long as they’re off someone else’s coast. Way to think globally.), he just put the kybosh on a pipeline that would have directed oil to refineries here and mitigated some of the cost at the pump over complaints from enviro-nuts …never mind the area already has multiple pipelines that aren’t destroying the aquifer. (And more importantly, allows BSNF [Warren Buffet's company] to continue shipping oil more expensively)
The cost of fuel to move goods to market adds to the price of things, and don’t let the Commerce Department tell you any differently, we’ve already gota rise in inflation — but it’s in commodities that conveniently don’t get factored in: food and fuel. The cost of gas is taking a massive bite from people’s budgets, but that was part of the plan to make “energy costs necessarily skyrocket” so we could be forced onto immature, expensive forms of energy production that his buddies just happen to be heavily invested in.
Secondly, his idiotic foreign policy and amateurish efforts to gin up a war with Iran to bolster his re-election with the typical “don’t change a horse in midstream” argument can be played. The game of brinksmanship now has Iran threatening to cut off oil exports to Europe (unlikely — they need the money), and Iran is now openly touting their bunker in which they are proceeding with their nuclear weapon ambitions — more to scare the crap out of the local regional powers (Saudi Arabia and Israel) than to threaten the US…say, haven’t we heard this chorus before?
So thanks to the president’s actions, we’ll be suffering through the same kind of fuel price spike that killed off the economy in 2007-08. One up side, it’ll happen around the time of the election.
08 Wednesday Jun 2011
Posted in Environment, Politics
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That’s what Government General Motors CEO Dan Akerson is suggesting. Seeing as how the Chevy Volt and other crappy electric cars the company is making aren’t selling all too well with that $40,000 buy in (and just wait ’til you have to replace that battery 3-4 years down the line for $10,000!), Akerson is pushing for the government to stick its thumb on the scales again to aid GM.
“There ought to be a discussion on the cost versus the benefits…” the giant tool tells us. This is true: what are the real costs, monetary and environmental of building batteries that make lots of nasty waste and cost a bundle, when the internal combustion engine has been steadily getting cleaner and more efficient over the last 30 years? What is the cost in jobs — something he claims to care about — when immature technologies are pushed as an alternative…nay, a necessity to existing, efficient systems already in existence.
I’m all for electric vehicles, once you can get the battery technology to a point where I’m not buying the equivalent of a Ford Aspire every three years, but we’re not there yet. Hybrids are improving, but they have the same problem (just ask one of the Birkenstock wearing early adopters that are just now having to replace the cells on that Prius.)
A $1/gallon hike in tax on consumers already burdened by too much tax and too high prices due to bad monetary and energy policies, plus market speculation is a ridiculous idea.
