Aside from the military base-to-refineries idea and the tax break for hybrids, is there anything here that’s notably different from his earlier (Enron-backed) energy proposals?
Meanwhile, BusinessWeek notes the latest plan is just riffing off Frank Luntz’s Republican propaganda playbook:
Besides, it was just a few years ago that the enviro watermelons were telling us all that big cities were evil consumers of rural resources and that everyone had to move to villages. If people were dumb enough to listen to them this time they’ll just come up with some reason to move everybody again in a few years when they have a new idiotic pet theory.
Why don’t we just admit it? To quote “pogo”…“we have met the enemy and he is US”! WE will have to do the conserving…and that means using some common sense (like not driving a two-ton SUV 10 miles to buy a pack of cigarettes). That, and turning down the thermostat a few degrees.
It’s hard to get people to sacrifice for their common good, especially when people are so wasteful of energy.
How about TAX INCENTIVES to adopt more efficient cars, appliances, etc.?
It would be a complete reversal of policy, is why.
“Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” - Dick Cheney
I’m not trying to start one, nor defending the Dems in this area. The problem is that neither party is addressing the problem the way it needs to be addressed; the Bush Admin is in denial about the real nature of the crisis, and the Dems are offering no more sensible alternative. We need to start exerting some grassroots pressure on both sides.
You don’t make them, you act to shape the market forces in the right directions. First, put the mass-transit systems in place so that convenient alternatives to automobile travel exist, even for suburbanites. (That should include a national high-speed rail network, regional commuter-rail networks, and local light rail. See http://www.newtrains.org/pages/354049/index.htm.) Second, enact growth-management plans to prevent any further suburban sprawl. That’s a state and local government function, but Congress has managed to impose national standardization in many areas before by the expedient of making federal funds for relevant purposes conditional on state compliance.
You’re oversimplifying. The problem is that we (and, more importantly, the corporations that build our homes) might not adjust quickly enough. I direct your attention, again, to this passage from the Kunstler excerpt above:
Gas-electric hybrid cars are a step in the right direction (my Dad’s Prius gets almost 50 mpg), but, as I said, they’re only a halfassed temporary stopgap measure.
All-electric cars won’t be attractive until they come up with a battery that can take you as far as a full tank of gass (300 miles or so) before recharging or swapping out; also, that’s a lot of batteries to manufacture, and they present environmentally dangerous disposal problems of their own. And remember, a battery only stores energy; it still has to be generated somewhere.
I hope there’s some future for hydrogen fuel cell cars, but bear in mind that hydrogen, apart from what we can extract from natural gas, is, like an electric battery, not an energy source but an energy storage medium. You electrolyze water, and oxygen and hydrogen comes out; well and good, but you have to put some sort of power into it. Probably nuclear power plants. I’m no alarmist in that area, I think technology has improved enough to make nuclear power safe (have they ever had a meltdown in France?); but we still haven’t quite solved the waste-storage problem, have we? In any case, shifting over to hydrogen-cell cars means building a whole new infrastructure for the manufacture, bottling and distribution of hydrogen. It will take decades – and we might or might not have that long before a fuel crisis hits us hard. And I’m not convinced hydrogen cars can be made to operate with the same speed and range we’ve come to expect of our gasoline-powered cars.
As for alcohol, my understanding is that when you take its energy value, and subtract the amount of energy (i.e., diesel fuel burned in John Deere tractors) needed to grow the biomass, it’s a net energy loss. We’re better off just growing the corn and eating it.
We should continue research and development along all these lines, to be sure; our clever scientists and engineers might surprise us yet. But we shouldn’t rely on them. We shouldn’t just assume a technofix will be found just in time, just because we’ve been lucky on that score for several decades now. Some technofixes turn out to be flatly impossible. “Ah canna change the laws o’ physics, Captain!” While all that R&D is in progress, we still need to take decisive steps to prepare ourselves for a possible future where the effective price of gas (or any practical substitute) at the pump is $10 a gallon, 2005 dollars, and there is just plain no way of driving it down.
“Prevent any further suburban sprawl” is not making people move back to the cities? I distinction w/o a difference. And the idea of the federal government “putting mass transit systems in place” will turn your famous red states redder than red. Yeah, let’s tax Iowans to put mass transit in the SF Bay area.
Let me get this straight. Businesses might not react fast enough to market forces, so the government has to step in? Just because some guy voices some opinion in a report doesn’t make it true. That’s an extraordinary claim, and should have some extraordinary evidence to back it up. Government is not known for its speed of innovation. Sorry.
Anyone watching his speech tonight? It’s getting pretty painful. He sounds awful defensive.
Kunstler at least (I don’t know about others) does not suggest a return to the ‘urban jungle’. To quote from an interview he did with a local paper:
The idea is that we’re already in that gradual transition, yet not dealing with it in a meaningful way. When you’re talking about the failure (or at least major crippling) of an entire infrastructure, ‘suddenly’ can take the shape of 10 years, or 20 years, or some longer period of time.
Regarding gasohol/biodiesel, here’s an incisive comment by Kunstler in his “Clusterfuck Nation” online column – http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary13.html:
As John Mace said up near the top, the first thing to do is define the problem. Without that, one can come up with plenty of ‘solutions’ that don’t meaningfully address the problem.
So, what is the problem right now? Is there an anticipated crisis in electricity generation? Whether we ought to be talking about power plants - nuclear or otherwise - as a solution depends on whether this is part of the problem.
The visible problem, of course, is gasoline at $2.25 a gallon. But power plants don’t generate gasoline. So unless there’s also an electricity-generation crisis at hand, much of Bush’s ‘plan’ is meaningless.
Then there’s the refinery question. It’s surely possible for economists to tell us how much of the increased price of gasoline is due to oil prices of $50-55/barrel, and how much is due to tight refining capacity. If shortage of refinery capacity is a major contributor to high gas prices, then building new refineries solves that part of the problem. But if its contribution to the problem is minor, then once again, it’s a solution looking for a problem.
One question that needs to be answered before we build more refineries, assuming doing so makes sense from other perspectives, is: how much more refinery capacity can be used if we add that capacity? IOW, can Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or somebody pump enough extra oil out of the ground to keep the existing refineries busy, and the new ones too? Or are we peaking out already, as some suspect?
The Democratic position for a long time has been: increase CAFE standards. But since the GOP was able to block Democratic attempts at that back when the Dems actually controlled parts of Washington, I expect the Dems don’t see the point in pushing real hard for it now, when they don’t control anything at all.
We’re probably peaking out, or will within five years. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (http://www.peakoil.net/), which was founded in part by geologists who had worked in the petroleum industry, expects the world to pass the all-time global “Hubbert peak” of oil production in 2007. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of crude for the refineries to process in the next couple of decades. “Peaking” does not mean imminent total exhaustion of the world’s oil supply, it means that henceforth it will cost more and more to pump every barrel out of the ground, and global production will be a little less every year, following the downslope of a bell curve. (Which, by itself, is quite enough to disrupt the economy of every industrialized nation – oil price spikes in 1974, 1979 and 1991 each sparked a global recession, and those were just temporary spikes caused by political conditions; we won’t be so lucky next time.) There’s a good chart at this site: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ And here’s another chart that breaks down oil production by country/region: http://www.peakoil.org/ (On the latter, note that U.S. oil production peaked around 1970, just as M. King Hubbert had predicted back in the '50s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak).)
The technological problem was solved long ago: encase it in glass or ceramic. The only remaining problem is political (i.e. facing down peasant superstition and NIMBYism).
Obviously, this situation will not occur overnight. If it does, the steady rise in gas prices will produce the necessary adaptations (including a ramping up of R&D into alternatives, willingness to accept lower vehicle performance if substitutes don’t quite measure up to gasoline-enging vehicles, etc) without artifically imposed “decisive steps”.
And the previous century, and the one before that, and…
Another problem is financial. Nuclear power plants find it much cheaper to put spent fuel rods in pools of water than to encase them. They seem determined to continue this practice even though those storage pools are an obvious target for terrorist attacks. See http://www.weeklyplanet.com/2005-04-06/panic.html.
None of which proves technofix can solve all our problems, which is what you (and most of America) seem to be assuming.
I’ve been reading a bit more Matt Simmons lately, and even if he’s wrong about Saudi Arabia (at the link, check out the link to "full transcript of Simmons’ presentation), it’s hard to see how he could be too far wrong. So I believe peak oil is near.
But back to refineries, once we’re at peak oil, the world will not need to increase refinery capacity, because less oil will be pumped out of the ground each subsequent year. I don’t know if we’d need different sorts of refineries as the remaining oil diminished in quality as well as quantity (ask a petroleum engineer, not me!), but if we’re near peak, building more refineries is a big waste of money.
Oh, it’ll be nasty, alright, and nobody’s minding the store, trying to prepare us for this. Bush’s energy policy is basically irrelevant.
The above comment is directed toward the problem of the radioactive residue from the operation of nuclear power plants.
Correct me if I’m wrong. It seems to me that the main problem with such material results from it being concentrated in one place. By this I mean that the total amount of the world’s radioactivity hasn’t been increased any by the development of nuclear energy has it? However such material has been gathered, refined and concentrated and then all located at the site of nuclear power plants.
It would seem to me then that one way to dispose of the waste would be to somehow unconcentrate it by breaking it up into something having the consistency of sand and scattering it widely. We live with a certain level of background radiation all of the time and this method shouldn’t increase that noticeably.
The logistics and economics of this are beyond me and such an idea might be wildly unrealistic. However I don’t think it any more unrealistic than some proposals I’ve read about leaving the stuff in concentrated form, burying it in some supposedly remote and safe location and then watching over it for the next thousand years.
I think government regulations requiring them to do so would be appropriate (not a statement I make often), given the public-safety issue.