This video is a compilation of nearly 3 hours of talks at Google about thorium reactors. I thought it was a very interesting. It sounds plausible, but I have no way to evaluate the claims these guys are making.
This is truly amazing. The Obama Administration is prepared to provide up to $10 billion in loans to finance energy development off the coast of Brazil, but it won’t allow additional drilling in America’s waters—drilling that would create American jobs and bring in additional tax revenue?
Obama could allow more energy off the U.S. coast, but so far, his Administration has been committed to reducing domestic energy production. He revoked oil and gas leases in Utah, delayed taking action to open up additional areas for offshore energy development, and halted a program to allow commercial oil shale leasing. All of these programs would have created American jobs without imposing additional costs on taxpayers.
Why is the Obama Administration working to create job opportunities for Brazilians, but not jobs and additional tax revenue for the United States?
Loyd Case, the editor of the soon-to-be shuttered computer-enthusiast website Extreme Tech, recently wrote up his experience “going solar” one year into his experience. He spent around $38,000 to saves $3,000 a year in electricity costs. He mistakenly concludes that this the payback period is 12.5 years. That’s because he doesn’t include the the time value of his money.
If instead of paying for the solar panel up front, financed them with a loan, making payments of $250 a month, it would take 20 years at 5% interest to pay back his loan (if electricity costs and use remain constant). That is a long payback period, especially because solar panels will reduce in efficiency in the future.
Also, Case received a California rebate and Federal Tax Credit because he installed these solar panels. The California rebate probably amounted to $10,000. The real cost of his solar panels were nearly $50,000, making the investment in solar panel a bad deal.
President Obama’s automobile choice shows that he cares about features other than fuel economy, so why is he forcing the American people to choose fuel economy first and foremost?
When President Obama took office, he got a new car—a 8 mile-per-gallon custom Cadillac limousine. The reason the car gets such poor fuel economy is that it is designed to protect the Commander-in-Chief from many threats. The limo’s body is composed of sophisticated titanium, steel, ceramic and aluminum armor to stop projectiles. The armored doors are 8-inches thick and there is a 5-inch thick reinforced steel plate under the car to protect against bombs. The car is equipped with night vision cameras and Obama’s seat features a foldaway desk, laptop, and satellite phone so he can conduct business on the go. Because the car’s armor and accessories weigh so much, the car is powered by a 6.5 liter diesel engine.
President Obama, however, is proposing to limit Americans’ automobile choices and force Americans to buy more fuel economy than they would choose on their own. He is proposing a fuel-economy mandate that cars in 2016 model cars will have to get at least 42 miles per gallon.
Currently there are only three cars that get 35 miles per gallon or better, the Toyota Prius, the Honda Civic hybrid, and the Ford Fusion hybrid. In just over 6 years, automakers need to improve the fuel economy of the entire fleet by 40 percent. This is possible, but it will be costly, limit American’s car choice, and it will be deadly.
A 2002 study from the National Research Council found that the federal government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy mandate contributed to 2,000 deaths per year. The reason for this death tool is that frequently there is a tradeoff between the size of a car and safety. Cars have become safer, but today’s small, fuel efficient cars are still more dangerous than other cars in two-car frontal offset collisions, even again medium sized cars.
President Obama didn’t have to choose between safety and fuel economy when it came to his limo. He shouldn’t force the American people to be forced to choose smaller, more fuel efficient and less-safe cars.
I love this rant by Nick Gillespie of Reason. It sounds like at some point he had some hope in Obama, but that hope is now dashed.
Gillespie is beside himself with Obama’s silly yammering about high speed rail. Gillespie is correct to point out that high speed rail has almost nothing to do with traffic congestion. High speed rail moves people between cities, but traffic is centered in and around cities. The traffic I drive though in Washington, D.C. is almost exclusively caused by people trying to get from one part of the D.C. metro area to another. When I get in a traffic jam on Sunday afternoon on I-66, it isn’t caused by people who could be taking high speed rail to the sprawling metropolis of Front Royal, VA.
Wasting billions on high speed rail is silly. It can’t be defended. America’s rail transport system is actually pretty good. But unlike Europe’s, which almost exclusively carries passengers, America’s almost exclusively carries freight.
This is my luxury of living in the minority. I get to criticize the Democrats and the Republicans.
Nick Gillespie has some good thoughts for Rep. Kantor’s questions about a stimulus package:
We are living in interesting times. In July, oil hit $147 a barrel. Five months later, oil prices have dropped by $100 a barrel. Not only that, but now it is profitable for people (if they have a few hundred million or a billion laying around to buy crude at today’s spot price, store it for a year, and lock in a profit by selling it forward. Platt’s explains the scheme:
the forward curve for oil is now providing a huge incentive for market participants to store oil. For example, the one-year spread between December 2008 and December 2009 crude is running about $10, and the combination of financing and storage costs aren’t enough to wipe out that profit incentive to buy oil now, sock it away for 12 months and collect the difference in price.
Apparently it is now profitable to rent supertankers and store the oil in supertankers because of the contango.
Usually the contango gets arbitraged away, but the credit crunch is keeping people on the sidelines, allowing the big boys to make money because they have billions in cash.
Bruce Yandle has as brilliant theory about regulation. Here’s his short explanation:
Durable social regulation evolves when it is demand by both of two distinctly different groups. “Baptists” point to the moral high ground and give vital and vocal endorsement of laudable public benefits promised by a desired regulation. Baptists flourish when their moral message forms a visible foundation for political action. “Bootleggers” are much less visible but not less vital. Bootleggers, who expect to profit from the very regulatory restrictions desired by Baptists, grease the political machinery with some of their expected proceeds. They are simply in it for the money.
The story’s name draws on colorful tales of states’ efforts to regulate alcoholic beverages by banning Sunday sales at legal outlets. Baptists fervently endorsed such actions on moral grounds. Bootleggers tolerated the actions gleefully because their effect was to limit competition.
So what does this have to do with Daylight Savings Time? Simple, the reason the Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended Daylight Savings Time to cover more of the year is a classic situation of Bootleggers and Baptists.
In this case, the Baptists were the people who claimed that extending Daylight Savings Time would save energy. There was little empirical support for this change, but it sounded good. Congressman Ed Markey was one of these Baptists claiming the change would save energy.
Who were the Bootleggers–the people in the background that would benefit from the change? Apparently Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores. Strange but true. For whatever reason they thought they would do better business.
Does the change to extended daylight savings time back up the claims of Mr. Markey and the other environmental proponents of the extension? Of course not. The balance of the evidence now shows that daylight savings times does not save any energy. If anything, it increases energy use. Here’s the summary of studies from Wikipedia:
Several studies have suggested that DST increases motor fuel consumption.[7] U.S. gasoline demand grew an extra 1% during the newly introduced DST in March 2007.[32]
What lesson do we learn from the change to extended daylight savings time? 1. Some groups benefit from regulatory changes. 2. When Congress or the President tout easy ways to save energy, they are almost certainly wrong.
Environmentalists don’t seem to understand that life involves unavoidable trade-offs. Nathanael Greene, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently wrote a post titled, “Europe catches up to the US on biofuels policy” in which he approves of the EU’s decision to “stick to its 10 percent goal for biofuels but require an increase percentage to be advanced biofuels that don’t compete with food production.”
The problem is that you cannot avoid competition between biofuels and food. The EU may state that new alternatives won’t compete with food production, but wishing something doesn’t make it so.
The first place new biofuel crops will be grown is on land that is already in cultivation. Instead of growing corn, for example, farmers will grow switchgrass. Instead of taking corn and turning it into fuel, these policies are just taking land that would have produced corn and re-purposing it to produce fuel.
There only difference is that advanced biofuel crops should be more efficient. But advanced biofuel conversion technology needs to first make it out of the lab out of the lab and into commercial-scale production. If biofuels could be made from organic waste, then advanced biofuel wouldn’t compete with food, but that’s the only scenario.
The point remains–our biofuel policies are taking food out of the mouths of the world’s poor. That is the unavoidable outcome our mandating the use of food for fuel. As the UN special rapporteur has stated, biofuels are “a crime against humanity.”
If the human toll of increasing food prices wasn’t enough, the environmental costs are significant. Today’s biofuel production releases more greenhouse gases than petroleum production and we are turning miles and miles of jungle into biofuel plantations.
You will be seeing and hearing a lot from T. Boone Pickens over the next few months. His publicity blitz have been very impressive as Nancy Pelosi even invited him to talk to the Democrat Caucus even though he financed the Swift Boat group in 2004.
As beguiling as Pickens energy plan is, it is disingenuous. His energy plan will not get us off of foreign oil. If you read the plan, it is obivous that Pickens is not serious. He is obviously not serious because his answer for getting of foreign oil is–wait for it–to use wind power. This non-sequitur is the cornerstone of Pickens’ plan. Just read this page from his website.
If you don’t want to read Pickens’ plan, here’s a condensed version. Foreign oil is bad. The wind blows a lot in America. We can produce electricity from wind. Cars can run on natural gas. Wind power can displace natural gas used for electrical generation. That’s his argument, but just doesn’t work.
Oil and electricity have very little to do with each other
Pickens states that we use a lot of foreign oil and then notes that “The United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power.” That’s fine and good, but oil and electricity have very little to do with each other. In 2006, only 2% of the electricity in America was generated using oil. Two percent. Eliminating that 2% isn’t going to “get us off foreign oil.”
Wind does not produce electricity in the way we use electricity
We want on-demand electricity. We don’t just want electricity when the wind is blowing the right speed (wind turbines only produce electricity when the wind is blowing hard enough, but not too hard). We want some electricity all the time–to run our computers, refrigerators, etc. We also want to have more electricity at times of high energy use–such as the afternoon when we want to run our conditioners more.
But even in the best locations, wind only produces electricity 35% of the time. People don’t want electricity just 35% of the time.
Wind power can only displace a very small amount of natural gas
When new wind farms are built, we have to have natural gas-powered electricial generation for when the wind doesn’t blow. Natural gas turbines can quickly spin up, making them ideal to use when the wind quickly changes. But as a result, wind can only displace a very small amount of natural gas. In fact, as there is more wind production, we need more and more natural gas-fired turbines to make up for the slack when there isn’t more wind. This does not free up natural gas to power our cars.
Pickens has large investments in natural gas
Unsurprisingly, Pickens has large investments in natural gas. By increasing the amount of wind generation only makes natural gas more valuable, increasing the value of his holdings. Becuase the subsidies are so lucrative for wind prouction, Pickens will also make money from his wind turbines (even though he thinks they are ugly and so he doesn’t have any on his ranch).