Thread: Rant!

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wow! glad you got that off your chest , i agree 100% but normally when i get to thinking such things i go buy a case of beer and get bent!!

We've kind of whipped this one quite a bit on a couple other threads lately. If you go to the thread about $9 gasoline you'll see most of the latest. Ironic you bring up the Brazilians, they recently made a HUGE crude oil discover off their own shores. They need to as they're beginning to peak out on ethanol production and will need it.

Okay, we've (as a federal government) spent somewhere around $40 billion over the last near 30 years subsidizing "alternative energies". Results to date? Nothing that will be scaling up to more than 2-3% of our energy needs in the next 10 years. Even our govt estimates that in 20 years we'll still need to meet 85% of our energy needs with petroleum. So here's an idea. We need to drill all we can to stay competitive for now so that emerging nations don't eat our lunch. Then, instead of politicians picking losing ideas for alternatives we take a lesson from the early part of the 20th century. When visionaries wanted to promote the advancement of motorized vehicles they offered a very large monetary prize for pioneer auto makers who could do what most thought "impossible". The entrepreneurs saw the carrot and developed. Same thing happened in aviation a couple decades later. Had we put up a $40 billion prize 30 years ago when we got the first warnings from the Opec embargo I bet something would be market ready by now. Instead we keep feeding flighty ideas that are promoted by those with a handful of I wants and a mouth full of gimmes. So too many of the "guys on the street" think we're going to solve the problem by turning our food production into vehicle fuel (maybe one good thing to come out of the horrible flooding will be an end to that self defining idiocy), or windmills out in the boonies that will need enornous amounts of additional dollars to run high tension lines to attach to the nearest grid point (oops, didn't realize we needed to do that too), or any of a handful of other ideas that only sound good until you try to figure out how to produce enough of it to matter, at an economical cost so we can remain competitive with those who aren't chasing folly, and get it to the consumer in a timely way for use on demand reliably. But heaven forbid we use something like nuclear that has a proven record!!!

When the answer(s) come it will be the private sector, not a government goody program, that will provide the answers.

Heres my 2c,
The dirty old US govt are predisposed to opppose anything which is energy efficent and works because all the polititians are in the pocket of the corperations.
The continental US has almost enough oil to be self sufficient, BUT if the US stopped importing oil then the world standard dollar would shift from the greenback, to the Euro. Then the US dollar would devalue beyond belief. Then the US economy would collpase. This would in turn cause the 90% of the world econmys to fall over too.
The obcene cost of fuel is a crime. Here in NZ we are paying $2.12 per litre. Our buys about 75c US, and theres 3.6 litres to a US gallon. You do the math.
How much are you paying per gallon ATM?