This About Sums It Up
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Archived in: Congress, Democrats, Energy Policy, RepublicansJune 17, 2008 at 11:49 am | Trackback
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47 comments
Thanks for the laugh. The real kicker is the ’source’ line - hysterical.
fred, name all the other countries that are onboard with global warming/Kyoto/reducing energy that also refuse to allow drilling off their coastlines. I’ll make it easy, name the next nine in any order after us.
Also, fred, instead of scoffing at the “source line”, provides something substantial in reply. I’m disappointed, fred. I thought you had something worthwhile to say.
Flattery will get you nowhere, Hotspur.
All the suggestions made will not have an impact for a long time - typically something like 10 or more years - before the first drops of oil flow from those sources. And even then, the amount is but a fraction of what is already used any day. The increase in worldwide demand between now and then will greatly overshadow any small amount of oil extracted from those areas.
Besides, while reducing our dependence on foreign oil is a worthy goal, replacing it with greater dependence on domestic oil is merely delaying the inevitable, and not by much.
That’s half a conclusion, fred, not an analysis or a solution. C’mon, you can do better than that. You sound like Pat Buchanan, the guy who can find a rabbit pellet in a field of chocolate cherries. Is that all you’ve got? Show your work.
Greater funding of mass transit including & especially high-speed inter-city rail, careful increasing in nuclear energy (yup, I’m a liberal who is generally pro-nuclear energy), higher mileage standards for vehicles, and greater investment in renewable sources. For starters.
And I don’t mind the idea at taking a closer look at oil speculators. Anyone who thinks the market has the answers should take a closer look at some of our recent bubbles. And oil may be the new one.
I don’t pretend to have a total answer - and I won’t make up numbers like the House Republicans (because really, nobody has any idea what things like that would really do to prices anyway) - but those are the kind of things I’d like to see focused on. Giving people alternatives such that when prices do spike, they have elsewhere to turn.
Hmmm. The usual stuff. You’re don’t pretend to have the total answer, but suggest things which you, yourself, claim, represent unknowns.
Speculators. That’s an entirely different problem, and when you can figure out how to control even one slice of the commodities markets, let me know.
Point is, fred, you have no answers, just details that are ideologicaly, aesthetically, and morally pleasing to you.
“All the suggestions made will not have an impact for a long time - typically something like 10 or more years - before the first drops of oil flow from those sources.”
Right, that’s what that balloon Clinton said in 1998. Here it is 10 years later and that King of the A**holes screwed the country, not just an intern.
Why did Pelosi wet her panties when the Saudis said they would increase oil by only 800,000 bbls/day and we can produce a million bbls/day with offshore. The chinks have leased areas off our coast. You think they filed for permits or care if they have a spill. Do you?
fred, in comment #2 I asked you a question. Where is the answer. Why are you avoiding it? Hotspur, go up and read it, maybe you can get this, uh, brain to answer the question. Just don’t squeeze his head, that brown stuff stinks.
I didn’t think he would answer you, VW.
As for that dreadful 10-year lag, high speed inter-city rail, nukes and “renewable resources” would take nearly as long, and replace next to nothing.
As for modern rail service, I’m a train fan, but unless the idiot pols stay out of it, it will never be cost-efficient. Think Fred Hobbs…and the liberal solution to most ills is to give his type more power, more money, and more excuses.
VW, I did not see your question, and I don’t know the answer. Care to share it with me and explain the relevancy?
Hotspur, the difference between my 10 year solutions and the Republican 10 year solutions, is the one I named are permanent solutions, while additional sources of oil are temporary bandaids that will just run out and leave us and the earth in worse shape for only temporary delaying of a problem. Eventually we’d have to turn to the other solutions anyway.
As for rail, currently, funding for road & highway infrastructure has, what, tens of hundreds of billion of dollars head start in public funding? Lets even that out and then we can let the market decide.
fredct: “Greater funding of mass transit including & especially high-speed inter-city rail”
10 years to build a national system interconnecting all the cities? Yeah, right.
fredct: “areful increasing in nuclear energy (yup, I’m a liberal who is generally pro-nuclear energy)”
The majority of your liberal buddies consider this a nonstarter. Ergo, it won’t happen.
fredct: “higher mileage standards for vehicles”
More people have died because of lighter weight vehicles than have died in Iraq, fred. So you’re cool with killing even more people, right?
fredct: “greater investment in renewable sources”
Which will all be here in 10 years, right? And even assuming the technology were available in 10 years all the infrastructure for renewable energy sources will be in, correct? I seriously doubt it.
What I do know fred is that liberals and Democrats have no plans for the short to intermediate range. The Jetsons flying car stuff is a ways off, but that’s all you guys point to. Not much of an answer for the people suffering today.
fred, no one here said we shouldn’t do some, or all, of the things you mentioned…you, and your side, believe that your preferences are the only answer. Oil, gas and coal are simply not on the table.
Good comment, Pat.
fred, lets use ZERO for the number for “we must save the planet from Big Oil” Kyoto/GW Alarmists that ban drilling off their shores or prevent expanded refining of fossil fuels. You couldn’t name one because their aren’t any.
Germany kicked the green weenies in the nuts by expanding their coal fired plants. It won’t be long before the Spanish kill the commie government there. The world is coming into the energy usage era and it will not be denied by you or your ilk.
What do the idiots do here? They launch massive attacks against partially constructed buildings setting them on fire. What a blow for freedom. Two sure results derive from criminal behavior as this; one is they will rebuild and more importantly, they will cut down more trees to do it.
Only a communist believes in the zero sum game. That has been proven a fallacy. Losers cling to it BECAUSE they cannot do anything productive in life.
This peak oil/Paul Ehrlich/green BS is a losers end game. You’ll see congress give up the booty within a week or two. Guns anyone?
The “it won’t be available for 10 years” argument is only proof that the speaker acknowledges that the action should have been done 10 years ago.
fred, you have the talking points down quite well, lots of blather.
If “alternative” energy sources are such a good thing, why did they s**tcan beating galley slaves and sailing ships for coal then by oil fired methods? Why did the Cro-Magnon start burning stuff instead of letting the sun heat their rocks. How come the third world countries rather heat with fossil fuels, instead of picking up sticks all day.
If the energy methods you name were so reliable, we’d be using them and they would not be called “alternative.” Look up the meaning of the word.
Why haven’t the Liberals/Progs just given the “poor and downtrodden” only their money in an orgy on beneficence? Why do they feel it is necessary to give other peoples money away, while they keep theirs?
Why so you feel it is your place to tell the world how to live? Look how far humans have come WITHOUT your help. Imagine how much farther we can go WITHOUT your help.
If the eco-nazis were around from the start, my guess Og would have clubbed them with the stone ax. Probably did. Cave men were smart.
Today we should just toss them into the coal fired electricity plants; get something useful from them and screw the god awful pollution they’d cause. If we start right now, we’ll have energy until the new oil comes on line.
And the name calling and nastiness has reached its typical fever level. It’d be nice to have a discussion once without the regulars resorting to insults and childish nastiness, but I see that’s still not possible. Oh well, don’t know why I expected anything different this time.
fred, give it up. That is typical socialist/libby tripe. Nobody called you any names, yet. Point to where someone called YOU a name.
The SOS you spout is rather tiresome, contains nothing new, solves no problems, if fact is a source of many of the current problems the world faces.
You answer no questions put to you, you cannot give a time line for solving an immediate problem in a reasonable time frame.
Just what do you bring to the discussion, besides hackneyed talking points.
No one here sees an iota of useful thought. Stop using the world’s oxygen supply and start using up the CO2 about which you’re so worried. You are a bore.
“You sound like Pat Buchanan” … now that’s a name
I didn’t just say name calling, I said nastiness, such as…
“you have the talking points down quite well, lots of blather”
“Look up the meaning of the word.”
“eco-nazis”
“toss them into the coal fired electricity plants”
“Why did Pelosi wet her panties”
“The chinks have leased areas off our coast.”
“kicked the green weenies in the nuts”
As for claiming that all nasty things said weren’t about me, we do have:
“will not be denied by you or your ilk”, lumping me right in
And of course…
“No one here sees an iota of useful thought. Stop using the world’s oxygen supply and start using up the CO2 about which you’re so worried. You are a bore.”
Lovely. While I can buy that Hotspur actually enjoys a dialog, most others here, especially you VW, just enjoy being a**holes to knock those with opposing viewpoints.
Oh well, enjoy wallowing in your small-minded, reactionary, narrow-world-view biases. Clearly you know everything already anyway, so why do you need anyone else around?
You really are the bunghole of the world! The only opinion you ever held was someone else’s.
Says the man quoting point for point the right wing talking points on the issue. Although you do add your own special spin of closed minded paranoia, I guess I have to give you that.
You don’t have to “buy” my interest in dialogue, fred. That usage is a covert and subtle kind of nastiness, which you often practice here, and which is evident (not always, but often enough) in your commentary. You aren’t polite, fred, or broad-minded, you’re just indirect.
What you don’t like in VW is bluntness, and a willingness to fight, but you seldom answer his questions or respond to his propositions either. I know more about him than you do…he spent hard time in a world (a world I know, too, but not as well), which is terra incognita to the languid, left-of-center, navel-contemplating bourgeosie of which you are a part.
He’s un-PC and direct, and if you confuse his manner with his content, the fault is yours. His view of the future isn’t an ego-projection from some silky, socially-c0nscious milieu inhabited by young liberals.
Personally, I can tolerate and even welcome nastiness from the man or woman who’s paid the dues, whether left, right, moderate, anarchist, radical of any kind, or bomb-thrower. It’s energetic and virile (un-PC) - nothing serious comes from the Sunday school Primary Department rules of debate except the participants’ self-satisfaction.
I think we all (including you) share an impatience, maybe a contempt, for sham, orthodoxy, and evasion. All of us take our opinions and perceptions seriously. You’ve been at this juncture before, and if I remember correctly, you usually end with something like “small-minded, reactionary, narrow-world-view biases” as your final shot.
I think your forms of progressivism are reactionary and reflexive, too. In fact, I’ve been listening to the boring liberal melodies since before you were born…and took them seriously for a long time. What annoys me about you is not your views, although they’re tedious enough, but the waste of a good mind on the same old songs.
Fred, Pat Buchanan is, in my opinion, more left than right. You’d be very comfortable with most of his views.
LL: “The “it won’t be available for 10 years” argument is only proof that the speaker acknowledges that the action should have been done 10 years ago.”
Op Pat: That’s like people in 1945 saying WW II was proof that Hitler should have been taken out in 1935. It’s absurd.
10 years ago, oil and gas were relatively cheap solutions to the world’s energy needs. The market has clearly shifted with plenty of help from liberal energy obstructionists who won’t let us drill, build nuclear power plants, or add refineries. Economically, alternative energy simply wasn’t feasible 10 years ago given.
OP, Hitler violated the term of the Versailles Treaty long before 1939. The world didn’t even ask him to make nice. So he did what he did best!
Iran is a mirror image of post ’20’s Germany. I guess it’s too early to do something there, right?
If alternative energy was viable, do you think energy companies would shun it? All companies look to increase market share as a means of boosting the bottom line and boxing out the competition.
Buggy whip companies would still be around if they started making fan belts and luggage holders.
Alternative energy (wind, solar, thermal) work well only on small scales, fine for assisting fossil, nuke or hydro. Recently Texas had a large brownout when the wind farm just wasn’t -windy. Imagine that happening on the Texas flats.
How about the Long Island Super Duper Wind Turbine farm meeting Hurricane Mothra. That should really generate something besides electricity, try excitement followed by 6 months of blackout.
If alternative energy worked on a viable scale, somebody would do it to make money.
Treaty of Versailles? Pat Buchanan. I just finished scanning 149 posts of V.D. Hanson’s takedown of Buchanan’s book claiming WWII was unnecessary. Interesting stuff. For anyone interested, here it is:
http://pajamasmedia.com/victor.....simulator/
VW nails it, too, on an issue that relates to “energy independence”. There are strategic reasons for EI, but customers gravitate to high efficiency producers and lowest price, which means that “foreign” energy providers are perfectly okay.
http://www.time.com/time/busin.....84,00.html
Summary: Drilling in ANWR and coastal drilling would likely effect oil prices by less than 4 cents per gallon each. The Republican spin numbers are pure made up B.S.
But sure, lets kill the earth a bit more and cut through the heads of some furry creatures just to have no appreciable effect. Why bother with real solutions when the ineffective, pointless ones require so much less thought, right?
Right fred, very right. They don’t vote, some taste good, the smaller ones make a neat sound when I run them over with my SUV (yes I drive a SUV). The patch of earth I want to kill is the patch you are standing on.
I’d say move to Europe except they’re getting a bit pissy with the eco-nazis about now. How about the Sudan? You don’t have to worry about too much of anything there, except maybe bullets. Then that experience might do you a bit of good; give you some insight on to “life on the edge.”
I suspect you won’t like what is coming down the pike around March or April next. It is a product of your idiot beliefs in collision with this past natural happenings in the Midwest.
One thing positive about you. You do bring new meaning to the word stupid!
Glad you acknowledge that you want to kill things purely for the sake of killing things, and not to actual solve any problems. Talk about Hotspur’s disdain of believing that your personal preferences are the only answer, you seem to fit that perfectly.
You know you want to destroy things for the sake of doing so. Your distaste for anyone who gives a darn about anything beyond economic profit is so strong, that you wish to see policies invoked purely to spite them, not because you feel the policies are correct. When your primary goal is to tick off the other side, your opinions are no longer your own, but merely the opposite of whatever someone else says. Like a child disagreed with their parent purely out of instinct, your opinions are the product of your deep seated hate, not of any rational thought process.
Go cry somewhere else.
Can dish it out, but can’t take it, huh?
Fred, everybody’s child who lost their life in those Towers never got the chance to disagree about someone else’s point of view. Is it possible that some points of view are simply…wrong?
Do you think it’s possible for a warrior to be motivated by a desire to protect that which he knows to be right and just?
fred, dispensisng psychological diagnoses is way beyond your capabilties (intelligence and perception)…or credentials, I would guess. But here goes mine…you were raised on the standard, clockwork lefty memes that conservatives are Authoritarian Personalities, fascists, provincials; all the rest that passes for thought among your kind. You can’t change. You’re too limited, too much the effete mama’s boy, and too charmed by yourself. Above all, you’re always the victim. How could you be anything else but what you are? You come by here because you can’t stay away. We reaffirm your native snobbery. Glad we can be of help in some way. I think you need it.
Oh gawd, he’s drooling and going na-na-ne-na-nya.
fred go to this site, http://www.thepeoplescube.com/, it is about you, specifically you and your thinking processes. Hours of mirror looking for your edification.
Helen, thanks for reinforcing the Bush notion of being unable to make an argument without referencing 9/11. VW isn’t being protective of anything, he merely seeks to spite those who has has already pre-judged and categorized as villains. Must be easy to see things so black & white, unfortunately it bears no resemblance to reality.
Hotspur, you’ve already proven repeatedly that your deep insight into others is lousy and leads to inaccurate conclusions. Did you really need to demonstrate it again?
VW, as I said above, there you go again lumping people into groups and considering all those who disagree with you are one solid mass of identical humanity. And fighting to spite a group which does not exists. Keep tilting at windmills, my dear Quixote.
That one was funny.
fred, cool off. You’re melting the adhesive tape on your glasses, and your pocket-protecter is getting all sweaty.
Fred, it is anatomically impossible for me to be President Bush! The message I posted was exclusively mine, composed with words of my choice without regard to anyone else’s opinion.
“Must be easy to see things so black & white, unfortunately it bears no resemblance to reality.”
Perhaps true of your reality, but not VW’s. Can we ask why you never volunteered for military service?
The didn’t issue Rod McEwan poetry sets.
His mommy wouldn’t let him play with those rowdy types.
With respect to Helen, I don’t care whether fred served or not. It means nothing to me, so I take back the Rod McEwan snark.
This is going to open up another rant about Bush Lied, and Iraq Was No Threat, and all the other left/paleocon/anti-neocon objections. All of them are meaningless now, anyway. The question is: what happens now in Iraq?
Obama has had four different, (maybe five) positions on Iraq, including his 2004 remark that his position on the war was the same as President Bush’s…and his most recent is that he essentially doesn’t know what he’ll do about Iraq “when” he’s the President.
If VW’s opinions are indeed black & white, as they appear to be, it is no virtue, regardless of his background. Platitudes and ideology is not a solution. Hotspur accuses me of only selecting solutions that I ‘like’, without a full study of the matter, but makes no similar criticism of VW, who picks only solutions that will annoy ‘liberals’ or ‘eco-nazis’ or any other convenient made up boogeyman in his head. Lumping all opposition into one group is convenient, but it is never accurate.
And the monsterous groups VW has created in his head, and the opinions and motivations he has assigned them, are no more real than the boogeyman in the closet is for children around the world. True, a towel hanging from a certain rod, looked at from a certain angle in a certain light may appear to form horns, but that’s about it.
Just as muslims are not, and communists were not, one solid groups - there are fights and different goals and agenda’s between and also within subgroups - such are the groups that VW villifies in his head and in type. And attempting to design your opinions around imaginary enemies truly is nothing more than tilting at windmills.
Back on the topic of energy, the one key fact is that natural resources such as oil and coal are limited, and digging deeper or more are merely temporary bandages on a bigger problem. One does not take an alcoholic and suggest he buy from another bar because his old one will no longer serve him. Eventually his town will run out of bars that will provide him his fix. We must have greater foresight to understand that our source of energy must begin to evolve and diversify. The longer we ignore that, the harder and greater the economic shocks will be to eventually push us that way.
The market is efficient, but it is stupid, emotion-run (i.e. bubbleprone) and short sighted. If we wish to avoid extremely painful shocks, we must plan ahead. We ignore it and find additional sources of addiction at our own peril.
Whatever.
Fred,
Good job picking these guys/gals apart. i don’t think i would have the stamina to keep up with their right leaning mentality.
Being a capitalistic society you’d think that they would be all for new technology and the jobs and profits that are out there to be had. But i guess that would require effort and that’s tiring. It’s easier to throw insults than knock down an original thought. keep up the fight.
cheers,
Original thought? Search for one yourself, Eric. It might help to read the comments.
Eric, the next time you have something that insightful to say, raise your hand and put it over your mouth. Your intelligence quotient soars that way.
I know. This isn’t a place to meet friends.
I take that back. I seriously want to hear more about high-speed rail service from someone who knows more about it than I do. It’s worthy of a post all by itself.