From the AP regarding the predicted national energy crisis:
Long-term thinking…producing more oil and gas. Producing more oil and gas…long-term thinking. Is there an apparent contradiction here, or is it just me? Does Bush have a different understanding of the meaning of “long-term” than I do? I ask this sincerely.
Anthracite, can you help me out on this? Anyone else?
You forgot to mention his Energy Secretary, Former MI State Senator Spencer Abraham, who twice (most recently in 1999) attempted to disband the Energy Department as unnecessary. but don’t worry 'cause, apparently times have changed
in a little over a year? Possabilities include: he has less than zero grip on the issue. his political opinions are flimsy , he lied, etc…
Gadarene, I don’t think it’s incongruous, depending upon what context you are putting “forward-thinking” into.
Do you agree or disagree with the following assertions by me?
1. This country (hell; EVERY country) is absolutely dependant on gas and oil?
2. This and every other country will be absolutely dependant on gas and oil into the foreseeable future?
(If you want to talk electric cars, the number of electrical stations that would be needed would necessitate a huge amount of fossil fuel-burning as well.
If you want to talk mass transportation, I agree it’s something densely populated urban areas should work to make more effective. It’s completely unworkable in a rural setting, however. And I’d like to know how you plan to force people not to drive their own vehicles. You think people are touchy about their guns …)
3. The United States is very dependent upon foreign sources of oil. This has proven in the past (indeed, the recent past) to be a less than stable, less than optimal situation, from the standpoint of both supply and price.
4. The United States has not done enough in recent decades to expand its domestic petroleum production, to lessen the need for foreign oil, and the influence it allows other countries to have over us.
Given all the above, “long-term thinking” and “producing more oil and gas” are not incongruous statements.
I agree with the point that I think you are making, however, that our long-term energy strategy needs to also factor bettering efficiency, conservation and searching for less polluting alternatives.
Sure he’s thinking long term, for his campaign contributors anyway.
Gadarene asks:
I don’t know. Let us begin by defining “long-term”.
There are two feasible possibilities for reliable long-term power production…
Perfect nuclear fusion as a power source.
More gas and oil.
What else would you propse, Guin? Build a giant treadmill and force prisoners to run on it to generate power?
Link to the A.P. or other source on this story?
Well, I will try.
Warning! Contains much opinion and educated speculation!
In terms of domestic energy, we can divide the majority of our consumption into two areas:
Transportation (oil).
Electrcity (coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewables, and a tiny amount of oil).
What my take on it is that Bush is saying we should develop oil resources (thus pushing for drilling in Alaska) to satisfy the first part, and attempt to develop natural gas resources (he isn’t referring to gasoline when he says gas) to satisfy the second part.
When he is talking “long term” with respect to oil, he is thinking along the lines of various recent schools of thought that think the price and price stability of oil will start to rapidly deteriorate by 2005 - or maybe earlier, near election time. While the Alaska contribution would not decrease our dependence on foreign oil that much, it would add significant price stability to the market. So the TV will not be showing us radical price jumps in gasoline every night before switching to the sidebar story of nuclear attack…
When he is talking “long term” with respect to natural gas, he is thinking along the lines of the EPRI EEPIC report which was presented to Congress, which laid out various possible scenarios for our future energy needs in this country. And many possible strategies for meeting them. Essentially, the only way that EPRI saw that we could sustain our energy needs, meet emissions regulations, site new plants, and reduce our rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions is to supply most all of our added capacity via natural gas-powered turbines.
In fact, IIRC (the report is not yet public domain) by 2030 they estimate coal dropping all the way from 50-55% of our energy contribution to being about 22-25%. With a tremendous amount of gas being utilized. Even still, we will be producing so much more CO[sub]2[/sub] that meeting the Kyoto Accords will be impossible by then - unless we are ready to radically change our way of life. EPRI also predicted that pressure from environmental groups would prohibit construction of new “advanced fission” nuclear reactors until 2020 or later, when the energy crunch just gets too much to bear. Let 'Frisco go dark for a month straight, and even Californians will be begging for a nuke plant next to the Bay Bridge.
So…that is what I think he is thinking. And it is what many in my area of concern think is the best plan, short term. I guess it depends though on what you consider long-term or short term - some would consider 2030 to be long-term, others short-term.
I, however, disagree - IMO, this is what I would consider “Medium Term”. I personally have a long-term strategy for working with our energy needs…but no one will elect me to implement them.
Move towards Clean Coal generation for all new baseload generation in the US. Strict emissions controls of 5% opacity, 0.02 lbm/MBtu particulates, 0.1 lbm/MBtu SO[sub]2[/sub], 0.1 lbm/MBtu NOx. Mandate mercury scrubbers, and possibly arsenic, lead, and cadmium as well.
A return (like in the Carter days) to focusing on reducing consumption - conservation. But seriously this time. Why does my street need 8 lights on one block? Why do I need 7 lights on in an empty house? Encourage demand-side management initiatives to reduce consumption.
Allow construction of new advanced “passively safe” nuclear reactors.
Raise the pitiful amount spent on fusion research to something worth a damn - like $20 Billion a year. And make the technology public domain.
Increase funding radically for biomass combustion, renewable sources, solar research.
Gulp…real incentives for slowing and even reversing population growth. Including eliminating the per-child dependent deduction for high incomes.
Implement a tax on gasoline and diesel and jet fuel (10 to 50 cents per gallon) that goes to a special research department - headed by an “Energy Czar”, so the money does not get sidetracked. This research department has 2 goals: discover a renewable way to produce bio-source gasoline, and discover ways to implement hybrid and electric vehicles, alternative fueled vehicles, battery research, etc. A “Marshall Plan” for transportation energy.
Well, although I am an arch-conservative in an arch conservative business, these views put me somewhat at odds with many colleagues.
Guin? I might be missing a post in this thread, but Guinistasia hasn’t posted in it yet. The OP was Gaudarene. Or, this could be another one of RTFirefly’s DNFTAYL moments. 
Whoop, yer right. I had just come from a thread that Guin had posted in.
Boy, is my face red!!!
Don’t self yourself short. You’ve got my vote.
However, to make a serious run at public office, you’d have to dump that plank in your platform dealing with population control. It makes far too much sense.
Milo: You were absolutely accurate regarding the point I was making. Your post makes a lot of sense.
Anthracite: As always, interesting and informative. You’re the reason I started this thread. Thanks.
I feel I should point out that Gadarene and I have not as yet merged into the same person, despite repeated confusion about this fact. 
I’ll have the “Anthracite for Queen of Everything” campaign buttons ready by the end of the week.
Why are we so worried about dependance on foreign oil? Short-term thinking, in my view. Sure, there’s a lot of Arab oil, but how long is that going to last? 40? 50 years? Hey guess what, in 50 years the Arabs will be buying oil from us! And, oh boy, will we charge them! But that’s just how my mind is thinking these days.
I have to say that I do like SPOOFE Bo Diddly’s giant treadmill idea. I think it’s more workable than you think.
Because our dependence on oil is a real crutch for our economy, and a tremendous hot-button item politically.
I mean think about the last time gas prices went up above $2.00 a gallon. Every single night the news opened with it as its latest story “Gas prices surge another 5 cents - can the children be saved?”
If OPEC somehow decided to cut ALL exports to the US, well, the practical impact is we could eventually produce enough and buy enough from non-OPEC countries to come close to our current level of consumption. But at what cost? I’m predicting, just a WAG…$5.00 a gallon for gasoline? Can you imagine the chaos that would cause in the public mindset?
I somehow don’t think it will work out that way…nice try though.
Hey Anthracite, here’s a nice conservative solution - deregulation, but not the wacky pseudo-deregulation that California enjoys. Specifically, make sure that the price of energy floats with market value. Then, as the cost of energy goes up (which it will do LONG before we come close to running out, because we’ll have to tap increasingly more expensive sources of petroleum like Tar Sands and deep ocean drilling), there will be an incentive for people to conserve or find alternate sources of energy.
As long as energy is controlled by governments, and prices are capped for consumers, consumption will continue to rise. Then governments hide the true cost of energy by subdisizing it with taxes, thus disconnecting cause from effect.
The same solution works for a number of other problems, like garbage collection. Many cities maintain flat rates for garbage collection, then subsidize it out of general revenue. And then they wonder why they have a garbage problem. First rule of the market - if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidize consumption, and you get more consumption.
Use pollution credits instead of hard limits. Allow a company that reduces its emissions to sell its credits to another company that can’t afford to. A market in buying and selling pollution credits makes energy conservation much more efficient.
Another one that sounds good but I’m not sure about (perhaps you could help me here) is the notion of allowing consumers to sell energy back to the grid. This would allow people to recoup some of their costs in investing with alternate energy sources.
Of course, by not following through on such pushes towards alternative energy such as this one: http://www.solarnow.org/beverly.htm
Maybe that Carter wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
(Admittedly, I don’t SERIOUSLY think that solar is the answer to all of our energy troubles, or even a large portion of them, but to ignore it almost completely is shortsighted and a generally bad idea. Also, this was a cheap plug for a cool site near my old high school.)
Actually, I might agree with Sam Stone to a certain degree, but I would take his idea one step further. Impose some sort of carbon tax, or other method to include the costs that are not being included into the price of the energy…And then that the market decide. (A pollution credit scheme could also work, but only if the credits are rare enough that it forces a reasonable representation of the full environmental costs onto the market.)
[Although I did read an article recently that was explaining why even with correcting externalities, there are ways in which the market system just does not work very well for utilities such as electricity. I don’t remember the arguments exactly, but I think they had to do with it leading to more volatility than people would tend to stand for in something like electric power.]]
Jshore: Privatized power doesn’t have to lead to volatility - sure, the price will change with the laws of supply and demand (as it should), but the utilities can adjust that with averaging plans and other pricing schemes.
For example, here in Alberta our power company just brought out a program that averages your power consumption over the year and charges a flat rate per month. So you don’t wind up with huge bills in the winter and tiny bills in the summer. They base it on your last year’s average consumption, then work in an adjustment which reflects the futures value of power over the next year. At the end of the year, if your consumption was higher than in the previous year they spread the increase out over the next year’s bill. If it’s lower, they apply a credit to the next year’s bill. This gives you a pretty stable price.