Hopefully. Large Power Plants use fuel oil almost exclusively to ignite their primary fuel, coal. Outlawing it would make it harder to get the coal burners started, which would lead to environmental problems (unburnt coal in the fly ash) without substantial savings of petroleum.
Oil and natural gas combined only account for about 10% of the electricity generated in the US. Most of that is at smaller facilities.
It sometimes seems to me that you and I are the only
*two* people who ask that question.
Generally speaking the economies of scale make pollution abatement at a large centralized power plant more effective overall than at hundreds of thousands of small engines.
I'd be happy to have the John McCain who ran in 2000.
I tend to think that his positions since have been:
1) Loyalty to the President who won the election and to the direction his party has taken.
2) Deference to the decisions made by the commander- in-chief during wartime.
3) Positioning himself to gain the support of the voters who defeated him in favor of Bush in 2000. (e.g. If you can't beat them, join them.)
So I don't know if he took the positions he did in
2000 to gain support of that part of the Republican Party that could be swayed away from Bush, or if those positions reflected his true principles and he is only pandering now or, and this I consider to be most likely he, like most politicians, has always pandered and has no genuine loyalty to any, or at most only a preciously small set, of principles.
It is all too easy to believe that a person who tells me what I want to hear, actually believes it himself.
dropped during 2000, stabilized during 2001 and began rising in 2002.
Interestingly, the price of refined petroleum products began rising as soon as Bush/Cheney took orifice, as if the companies anticipated the rise in crude prices:
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have started to go down now, with the Democrats still controlling the Congress.
Half of the continental shelf is currently open for exploration and extraction, and has been for years. I don't see why the Petroleum would be more inclined to explore an drill in the remaining half. I suppose that would open up the market for speculation, an 'industry' that neither produces nor contributes anything value.
Carter had one. But he never sold even his own party on it. That's because it was a long term plan, planning for the next generation. Which, BTW, IMHO is the only sort of plan that could work without major political/social. economic disruption.
Now that I mentioned his name, probably one or more persons will feel obliged to tell us they think he was a terrible President, but for completely different reasons, thus distracting the reader from considering where we might be had we followed his lead on energy issues.
that apply sales tax to fuels. But your link just lists general state sales tax rates (and gas, alcohol, and cigarette tax rates).
The link below lists states that have state and/or local taxes that are levied on gasoline or diesel. It's from 2002, but at that time there were only 5 states with state sales taxes on fuel, and 6 states that have some local sales taxes on fuels (Georgia has both). With the exception of those, federal, state and local governments fuel taxes are per gallon. So the federal government and 45 state governments have not seen any tax revenue increase due to the rise in gasoline/diesel prices.
Sure. And half of the continental shelf is, and has been open to drilling for years, and most of that is not being utilized. I see no reason to believe that opening up the remaining half would lead to more drilling. It would lead to more speculation I suppose.
I have offered to explain the causative link to you, so long as we restrict the conversion to science, and conduct it in a civil manner.
That's nice as far as it goes - I even sort of agree with you - but there is a huge pragmatic elephant in the room. The oil companies have been so vilified by the left, the enviros, the press, the populists, and so on that they are constantly under PR and even regulatory assault. For example, Katrina took out key refining resources. The oil companies knew this was problem long ago, but had apparently given up building additional capacity because pretty much no one wanted a refinery built in their back yard. We cannot have it both ways. Either the oil companies must be profitable without constantly having to defend themselves from every drooling cause in the country, or they will take what they have, sit on it and make no significant new capital investments.
As to their "responsibility" to pursue alternative fuels - I rather think that the market will solve this problem if allowed to. There isn't an "alternative" out there today that is currently economically rational. In order to see investment in things like hydrogen, there is going to have to be a reason for someone to do it - the belief that it will show a return on investment within some reasonable time.
But our genius politicians and populist sheeple leaders use government to distort the price of oil to try and keep prices "fair". I their every wheezing we hear how the big eeeeeeevil oil companies are making too much money so the government needs to "step in" by dropping fuel taxes, increasing regulation, and so forth. When the price of something is artificially depressed, there is less and less motivation for someone to find its alternative.
"Laissez Faire", I say - let the *market* set the price. The reason, of course, the Usual Suspects don't want to let this happen is because:
1) It takes the slimy politicians out of the equation thereby further exposing how unimportant they are.
2) A good many of the screech owls in the environmentalist left who whine about the lack of oil in the future, don't really believe it. They are terrified that - under real market conditions - there would be increased economic incentives to drill, refine, and explore more efficiently, thereby keeping crude and gasoline as energy staples at reasonable prices. They want to use government force to do what is economically irrational at the moment - make a huge forward investment in alternative technologies - many of which have no real future.
P.S. I want to be the first in line to picket the offices of Earth First, Green Peace, and the Sierra Club when these idiots finally figure out that their push to hybrid created an enormous environmental cleanup problem: The clean disposal of billions of lead-acid batteries that can no longer be recycled. I'd like to wish the whole bunch of those people the insanity that comes with ingestion of too much lead, but ... how would we be able to tell the difference from their mentality today?
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Fred, if it were that simple or obvious, it would have been demonstrated and verified by the scientific method long ago. It's not that simple. Is there some reason to believe in an anthropogenic contribution to warming? Possibly. But it's not as cut and dried as you like. You want to take a shot at making the case ... be my guest.
You seem to suggest in increasing the supply of refined products will reduce the cost when in fact the supply aready meets or exceeds the demand and MOST of the cost in the refined products is in the raw material itself.
Excess refining capacity is excess cost that does not contribute to the generation of additional revenue unless the company captures more of the market. A company with more refineries could not do that because the petroleum contracts in place do not allow them to buy more petroleum. But even if one oil company did expand its production and capture more the market, then some other would lose part of its share and decrease its product.
Production will NEVER significantly exceed demand for any significant period of time.
You apparently misconstrued my intent...I did not intend nor did I particularly challenge any of your statements..... but rather I simply asked for the basis of your general sweeping rhetorical comments. If you have no foundation fell free to enjoy your time out. Rod
Really? That surprises me. Cars like the Prius use what? Alkaline cells? Lithium-Ion? (Lithium, BTW, not being particularly more earth friendly than Lead, and - IIRC - cannot be recyled/reused often/ever as compared to L-A.) If you have references on this, I'd like to read them ...
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Let's keep in mind here, BTW, that the central question here is NOT, "Are humans significantly contributing to global warmiing?" That question is only of interest if you worship the earth and think humans are pox upon it. The questions of interest are:
1) Is GW happening at any remarkable or unusual rate?
2) Is GW - to the extent it is and will happen - even a danger to mankind?
3) Whatever causes GW - if it is a threat to humanity - can mankind do anything meaningful to ameliorate either its severity or consequences?
At the moment, the best knowledge we've got *suggests* (does not prove, and may change) these answers:
1) Hard to know because quality historic data is not abundant. There does seem to be some slightly higher than usual GW trends, but how bad they are depends on how long a timeline you use. If you you pick your timeline carefully, you can prove nearly any proposition you like.
2) Unclear. More people die prematurely in overly cold than overly warm climates as a rule. Water rising in the ocean could contribute to lowland flooding which does affect a lot of the population of the planet. However, the *rate* at which this is likely to happen - if it happens at all - has been vastly overstated by those deep scientific sages like Al Gore and the rest of his drone followers.
3) If GW is happening, and it's happening in dangerous bad amounts (whatever is causing it), it is almost certainly NOT the case that mankind has the resources to do all that much about. In this worst case scenario, we'd be far better off to do what humans do best: adapt. The odds of adapting effectively, are far, far better than the arrogant presumption that if we just go green enough, deny ourselves the very things that have made mankind so successful (energy, transportation, wealth, markets ...) we can "save the planet".
Like I keep saying the GW scaremongers like Peace Prize Boy are principally animated by a horrible combination of earth worshiping pantheism and socialist/Marxist political ideology. They are not credible witnesses to the questions or their remediation.
The scientists are clearly much more relevant in this discussion, but they too have agendas. Science itself is fairly dispassionate, but the people who do science are not. They are driven by their desire for funding and, at the moment, the funding is tilting towards the GW boogeman. Meanwhile, we have many reasons to continue to question the doomsayers:
Having just checked that, some do use lead--those are recyclable.
Lead-acid batteries are being phased out in favor of the nickel (nicad?) and lithium-ion batteries.
I'm not familiar with the lithium-ion technology though I am pretty sure that lithium is much less toxic than lead and nickel and not prone to biomultiplication.
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