Does dog give Obama gas? WE HAVE A NEW ENERGY PROGRAM!
British annual consumption = 3.5 tcf.
Just off shore = 1,000,000,000,000,000 tcf.
Beyond belief.
I think you misread the numbers. Consumption is 3.5 trillion cubic feet and new reserves are 1,000 trillion cubic feet, for a 285 year supply.
Thank you George, they hid a trillion on me in Tcf.
Consumption = 3.5 tcf.
Available = 1000 tcf.
Still a googly amount.
Yes, but it doesn’t do them that much good because their government-mandated eco-friendly energy saving condensing furnaces don’t work when it’s really cold outside. They might as well stick to burning peat. ^_^
How do they work with eco-friendly envirowackos? Now that solves two problems at once!
All the way to the bank.
Shortly after we had the Oil Embargo in the 1970’s, we got the first CAFE Standards. And drivers started thinking about how much gas costs anyway because the price was over fifty cents a gallon! . And the reasoning for the standards, according to the government was there was a ‘finite’ amount of oil. Oil which we all needed, worldwide, to make gasoline and diesel and a thousand other things we need of course.
Many energy experts said we’d have to have some sort of government intervention, like those stupid CAFE Standards, until there was a new power source found to displace our dependency on oil. And it had to be uber clean. There were more experts who said we’d never find another source as abundant as oil is / was, and oil and energy are dirt businesses, there was no clean source of energy, so just CUT BACK.
If we’ve got a 200+ year supply of natural gas, the UK has a similar amount, Poland likewise has enough for themselves and their smaller neighbors for 200+ years. Isn’t this the ‘new’ energy source we’ve been looking for for the last 40 years? It’s clean and most vehicles and power plants can be modified far cheaper than getting a new one. So why is all the hate and discontent still going on?
Better than that question, how about this one.
How much of the sound bites saying,
.
.
“fracking is evil, it pollutes the water and it kills people and it makes your sons GAY”,
.
.
are actually coming from the oil industry? If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, why can’t the Green People be working with the Oil People to stop the fracking? If we do fracking and fuel is cheap, clean and easy, the Green People lose their power AND their paychecks. Likewise, the Oil People would be broke and powerless.
So working together, it’s a win / win for both of them. The Green People win because they’ve stopped the fracking that they hate and they retain their power.
And the Oil People win because they get to keep fracking us at the pump, which keeps them eating and living indoors.
Is this as crazy as it sounds? Or would it be business as usual in the 21st Century, for two groups who hated each other last week, to get together to beat up the new rich kid on the playground?
I am just curious, what, exactly is “stupid” about the CAFE standards?
Just as the Usual Suspects will spring forth with a knee-jerk defense of whatever the Member of Congress from Broward County blathers about today, I am thinking that some on the Right Blogosphere also have their talking points and reflexive resentments.
Yeah, yeah, CAFE is a heavy-handed interference in the marketplace. And yeah, yeah, it has unintended consequences. Given that regulatory interferences in the market place tend to be one-size-fits-all and perhaps ham-handed, CAFE effectively ended the market for large rear-drive sedans such as the Crown Vic and the Caprice, although it was a slow ending. The unintended consequence is that it pushed a lot of consumers for big sedans into small trucks of various kinds.
So what is CAFE supposed to do? The way I see it, we have these cycles of boom and bust with oil and oil prices, where low prices sees everyone wanting big cars or substituting a light truck for a car, and high prices sees everyone scurrying to purchase small cars.
The problem is that the domestic automakers can’t switch between big cars and small cars that fast. It is thought that the import automakers have an advantage because they make mainly small cars in their trade-protected captive domestic markets and can grab market share bringing those cars “over here” every time demand switches to small cars.
Hence the CAFE standard is a regulatory policy attempting to help the domestic auto industry by leveling the playing field by biasing production towards smaller, more fuel efficient cars.
With respect to the auto companies wanting or not wanting that kind of “help”, many auto executives have expressed a preference for a higher gasoline tax instead of CAFE as a more market-based although still a government interference to solve the problem of cycles in the oil and car businesses.
On one hand, I much prefer CAFE to seeing much higher gasoline taxes. On the other hand, as a motorist I would be prepared to pay higher gasoline taxes if the money could all go into fixing the roads we have and building more and nicer roads. But I guess our social betters say we can’t have that, that the money has to go into trains or general revenue, or if we get more roads, the money has to go into multi-vehicle lanes.
So of all of the government policies, why the hate towards CAFE? If anything, the CAFE standards have doubled the fuel economy of cars whereas government-subsidized Amtrak has hardly changed at all in its fuel economy, to the point that the fuel economy of cars is not that much different than the fuel economy of trains.
Is that so bad, a government policy to make cars better that we don’t really need all of those trains? I would rather drive a government-mandated car but still have a car to go where and when I want rather than have to take a train everywhere, wait for the thing to show up, sit next to sneezy flu-ridden fellow passengers.
Paul,
I’ll tell you WHY I think it’s ‘stupid’. 25 years ago, or so, when the American car buyers started going from Impalas and Fairlanes to various minivans, the POWERFUL snappy engine thing went off the table in car buyer ‘needs’.
As gas prices had stated creeping up, car manufacturers had ceased talking about ‘0 to 60’ on STATION WAGONS, and 4 door vehicles. That was before the mini van craze even hit.
When ‘0 to 60’ went away in the buying public’s mind as a ‘need’, and people started buying what was basically a truck, fitted out for hauling kids and soccer balls instead of boxes of merchandise, we should have seen the government pushing for more diesel engines in American vehicles, instead of higher gas mileage.
If they were going to push for higher mileage, why not do it all the way?
That’s why I think the CAFE Standards are stupid. They wanted ‘mileage’ and they bypassed the best engine for the defined need. I’ve never understood why.
.
.
And these are NOT the only government rules or systems or ‘agencies’, I find ‘stupid’. I couldn’t write down all my dislikes or outright hates for fear of crashing Al Gore’s interwebs! I think there are things the government should do, but it’s mostly laid out in laws written and signed LONG before most of us here were born.
Let’s drop back to before Income Tax and Prohibition? It would work IMHO. After that, Civil Rights and Voting Rights is all I can see that we needed.
Most everything I see between those and since the early 60’s is a waste of time and money. I think we do need the NRC, but we don’t need ‘fracking cops’. We don’t need the Dept of Ed or ANY of their rules at all. likewise the Dept of Energy. NASA…is…outta here!
Most of our ‘entitlements’ would be gone in my world, and I’m drawing SSD and Medicare. So I’m cutting my own throat too on that one. But maybe less taxes would mean my wife’s salary could feed and house us too if we killed the NEED for all the tax money she is required to pay!
I could go on for days Paul.
But first I’ve got to get back to looking for a diesel engine and a bigger transmission for our 1990 F-150, and that’s a project I’ve been on for a while. I don’t just spout this stuff, I try to live by it.
I’m with you Der Schtumpy. All these depts. are the camels nose in the tent. It’s about the govt. controlling the people. Any justification is too much justification. The govt. is supposed to be limited. Do you think our founders would recognize the current state? They’d be asking King George to take us back.
OK, a couple of things.
Why do you need to shout at me in Internet-speak with putting “why” and “powerful” and “station wagons” in all-caps? I may not toe the Right-Conservative-Libertarian position 100% of the time or even 50% of the time, but I like to think that I don’t have a knee-jerk reflex to back up everything that the Obama Administration serves up, so why do I need to be yelled at in this manner. I also like to think that I listen to reason, that is, if I am not being beat about the head.
I kind of don’t get your complaint about 0-60 times. There has been a lot of advances in engine design since the 1970’s and even since the 1960’s, and sub 8-second 0-60 times seems to be the norm in many lines of cars these days.
As to Diesel engines, they have all manner of problems of their own, ranging from soot out the exhaust pipe to the fuel gelling in winter. Diesel engines have their applications but there are still questions if they are appropriate for widespread use in passenger cars. Also, some of the mileage boost of Diesels is misleading as #2 Diesel has at least 10% more BTU content per gallon, maybe even 15% more relative to the watered-down blends of today.
Finally, what about my reasoning that everything in society involves engineering trades, that I would much rather drive a fuel-efficient if not somewhat slower or smaller car then to be forced to commute by train at considerable tax payer expense. Increased fuel economy of cars is a Good Thing because it kicks the props out of a War on Cars when cars get comparable fuel efficiency to trains?
Paul,
I wasn’t thinking about shouting when I wrote that. I tend to speak that way in person too, with strong emphasis on certain words to make a point. But there is a difference in shouting and emphasis. As this wasn’t JRHS, BFF, mean girls tweet, I didn’t assume anyone would object. And as long as I’ve been commenting here or anywhere on blogs and news outlets, that’s THE first time anyone ever said that.
If you were offended, I retract my caps.
If I wasn’t typing, I’d be flailing my hands around too. Watching news is an aerobic event here some days.
And I don’t ‘object’ to the ‘0 to 60’ standard. But when do we see that in a family car ad now? I’m 58, that was in almost every car commercial when I was a kid. I even remember the sales guy giving my dad that line when he was looking at a 1968, AMC, full sized, 4 door station wagon. That’s why I included that example.
As to diesel vehicles, I’ve never heard that any diesel vehicle got less mileage than a same body sized gasoline run vehicle. I do know about the differences in fuels that you mentioned. I learned all that in gas turbine school in the Navy. And yes that fuel can gel but there are additives. Funky exhaust is a possibility, but I see plenty of big trucks and buses running cleanly. My training taught my most diesels blowing like that need the valves adjusted. So that’s a owner failure not a engine failure in my mind.
I’ve heard both sides of the diesel good, diesel bad conversations. And I always go back to the oil embargo. Back then diesel was supposed to be the be all and end all vehicle fuel. Even if there was exhaust fumes and that black visible smoke, it washed out of the sky when it rained. And unlike gasoline smog, diesel didn’t turn into acid rain or harm the atmosphere. But somewhere, that entire line of thought went away, to be replaced by high mileage gasoline vehicles and continued fighting over how to fix it. I’ve never heard anyone refute what I said about diesel exhaust vs gasoline exhaust.
In fact the two times I questioned an ‘environmental expert’ about that change in attitude, both times I got a lot of weasel worded , you’re thinking is outmoded, and why are you arguing with the experts, please sit down…next question please! And I’ve never seen a study refuting that outmoded thinking either.
But, that was also a time when the ‘experts’ thought we would have global cooling from smoke and pollutants in the atmosphere.
I’m not aware that I addressed the train vs car issue at all. Personally I don’t mix those two means of transport in my thinking. I live in NC, and you can’t get anywhere faster on a train from Central NC than you can driving. We don’t have light rail in my area either. Plus, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t do credit cards, so I can’t take a train anywhere, and rent a car on the other end.
So, I didn’t ignore the train reference, but I didn’t think I addressed it either.
Insanity prevails in the US as well: still no fracking allowed in New State. Even Pennsylvania seems to be catching a bit of the fever…
People in the U.S. prefer gasoline powered engines because they attain better volumetric efficiency in a normally aspirated configuration. This provides the smooth delivery of power across a broad midrange of RPM’s that people associate with a “swank ride”. Diesels engines have a stigma of soot, smelly exhaust, high vibrations, and loud knocking noises. I personally don’t give a crap, in fact I purposely made my car louder and stinkier. But there are lots of people that hear the odd clacking of an otherwise normal solenoid operating under the hood and they are taking the car to the dealer complaining of a “weird noise”. Diesels usually need a turbo to help boost that volumetric efficiency so that they will rev with a bit more urgency. But there again that turns a lot of people off because they hear that turbos deliver “peaky power” and overheat then burn out. That is honestly an outdated notion because the latest turbo systems use bearing materials, dry lubricants, and thermal transfer coatings that virtually eliminate turbo lag and cooling issues associate with turbo systems of the past. Not to mention the government has gone overboard with the requirement that diesels in the U.S. must have these complex catalyst systems with urea injectors just for no other reason than to kill the diesel smell out the tail pipe. But you also can’t overlook the fact that refineries that provide domestic fuels are tooled such to heavily favor gasoline production. So it sort of produces of self fulfilling cycle where car manufacturers produce cars that service the predominant fuel source and the refiners produce the fuel source that services the predominant type of engine.
Does dog give Obama gas? WE HAVE A NEW ENERGY PROGRAM!
British annual consumption = 3.5 tcf.
Just off shore = 1,000,000,000,000,000 tcf.
Beyond belief.
I think you misread the numbers. Consumption is 3.5 trillion cubic feet and new reserves are 1,000 trillion cubic feet, for a 285 year supply.
Thank you George, they hid a trillion on me in Tcf.
Consumption = 3.5 tcf.
Available = 1000 tcf.
Still a googly amount.
Yes, but it doesn’t do them that much good because their government-mandated eco-friendly energy saving condensing furnaces don’t work when it’s really cold outside. They might as well stick to burning peat. ^_^
How do they work with eco-friendly envirowackos? Now that solves two problems at once!
All the way to the bank.
Shortly after we had the Oil Embargo in the 1970’s, we got the first CAFE Standards. And drivers started thinking about how much gas costs anyway because the price was over fifty cents a gallon! . And the reasoning for the standards, according to the government was there was a ‘finite’ amount of oil. Oil which we all needed, worldwide, to make gasoline and diesel and a thousand other things we need of course.
Many energy experts said we’d have to have some sort of government intervention, like those stupid CAFE Standards, until there was a new power source found to displace our dependency on oil. And it had to be uber clean. There were more experts who said we’d never find another source as abundant as oil is / was, and oil and energy are dirt businesses, there was no clean source of energy, so just CUT BACK.
If we’ve got a 200+ year supply of natural gas, the UK has a similar amount, Poland likewise has enough for themselves and their smaller neighbors for 200+ years. Isn’t this the ‘new’ energy source we’ve been looking for for the last 40 years? It’s clean and most vehicles and power plants can be modified far cheaper than getting a new one. So why is all the hate and discontent still going on?
Better than that question, how about this one.
How much of the sound bites saying,
.
.
“fracking is evil, it pollutes the water and it kills people and it makes your sons GAY”,
.
.
are actually coming from the oil industry? If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, why can’t the Green People be working with the Oil People to stop the fracking? If we do fracking and fuel is cheap, clean and easy, the Green People lose their power AND their paychecks. Likewise, the Oil People would be broke and powerless.
So working together, it’s a win / win for both of them. The Green People win because they’ve stopped the fracking that they hate and they retain their power.
And the Oil People win because they get to keep fracking us at the pump, which keeps them eating and living indoors.
Is this as crazy as it sounds? Or would it be business as usual in the 21st Century, for two groups who hated each other last week, to get together to beat up the new rich kid on the playground?
I am just curious, what, exactly is “stupid” about the CAFE standards?
Just as the Usual Suspects will spring forth with a knee-jerk defense of whatever the Member of Congress from Broward County blathers about today, I am thinking that some on the Right Blogosphere also have their talking points and reflexive resentments.
Yeah, yeah, CAFE is a heavy-handed interference in the marketplace. And yeah, yeah, it has unintended consequences. Given that regulatory interferences in the market place tend to be one-size-fits-all and perhaps ham-handed, CAFE effectively ended the market for large rear-drive sedans such as the Crown Vic and the Caprice, although it was a slow ending. The unintended consequence is that it pushed a lot of consumers for big sedans into small trucks of various kinds.
So what is CAFE supposed to do? The way I see it, we have these cycles of boom and bust with oil and oil prices, where low prices sees everyone wanting big cars or substituting a light truck for a car, and high prices sees everyone scurrying to purchase small cars.
The problem is that the domestic automakers can’t switch between big cars and small cars that fast. It is thought that the import automakers have an advantage because they make mainly small cars in their trade-protected captive domestic markets and can grab market share bringing those cars “over here” every time demand switches to small cars.
Hence the CAFE standard is a regulatory policy attempting to help the domestic auto industry by leveling the playing field by biasing production towards smaller, more fuel efficient cars.
With respect to the auto companies wanting or not wanting that kind of “help”, many auto executives have expressed a preference for a higher gasoline tax instead of CAFE as a more market-based although still a government interference to solve the problem of cycles in the oil and car businesses.
On one hand, I much prefer CAFE to seeing much higher gasoline taxes. On the other hand, as a motorist I would be prepared to pay higher gasoline taxes if the money could all go into fixing the roads we have and building more and nicer roads. But I guess our social betters say we can’t have that, that the money has to go into trains or general revenue, or if we get more roads, the money has to go into multi-vehicle lanes.
So of all of the government policies, why the hate towards CAFE? If anything, the CAFE standards have doubled the fuel economy of cars whereas government-subsidized Amtrak has hardly changed at all in its fuel economy, to the point that the fuel economy of cars is not that much different than the fuel economy of trains.
Is that so bad, a government policy to make cars better that we don’t really need all of those trains? I would rather drive a government-mandated car but still have a car to go where and when I want rather than have to take a train everywhere, wait for the thing to show up, sit next to sneezy flu-ridden fellow passengers.
Paul,
I’ll tell you WHY I think it’s ‘stupid’. 25 years ago, or so, when the American car buyers started going from Impalas and Fairlanes to various minivans, the POWERFUL snappy engine thing went off the table in car buyer ‘needs’.
As gas prices had stated creeping up, car manufacturers had ceased talking about ‘0 to 60’ on STATION WAGONS, and 4 door vehicles. That was before the mini van craze even hit.
When ‘0 to 60’ went away in the buying public’s mind as a ‘need’, and people started buying what was basically a truck, fitted out for hauling kids and soccer balls instead of boxes of merchandise, we should have seen the government pushing for more diesel engines in American vehicles, instead of higher gas mileage.
If they were going to push for higher mileage, why not do it all the way?
That’s why I think the CAFE Standards are stupid. They wanted ‘mileage’ and they bypassed the best engine for the defined need. I’ve never understood why.
.
.
And these are NOT the only government rules or systems or ‘agencies’, I find ‘stupid’. I couldn’t write down all my dislikes or outright hates for fear of crashing Al Gore’s interwebs! I think there are things the government should do, but it’s mostly laid out in laws written and signed LONG before most of us here were born.
Let’s drop back to before Income Tax and Prohibition? It would work IMHO. After that, Civil Rights and Voting Rights is all I can see that we needed.
Most everything I see between those and since the early 60’s is a waste of time and money. I think we do need the NRC, but we don’t need ‘fracking cops’. We don’t need the Dept of Ed or ANY of their rules at all. likewise the Dept of Energy. NASA…is…outta here!
Most of our ‘entitlements’ would be gone in my world, and I’m drawing SSD and Medicare. So I’m cutting my own throat too on that one. But maybe less taxes would mean my wife’s salary could feed and house us too if we killed the NEED for all the tax money she is required to pay!
I could go on for days Paul.
But first I’ve got to get back to looking for a diesel engine and a bigger transmission for our 1990 F-150, and that’s a project I’ve been on for a while. I don’t just spout this stuff, I try to live by it.
I’m with you Der Schtumpy. All these depts. are the camels nose in the tent. It’s about the govt. controlling the people. Any justification is too much justification. The govt. is supposed to be limited. Do you think our founders would recognize the current state? They’d be asking King George to take us back.
OK, a couple of things.
Why do you need to shout at me in Internet-speak with putting “why” and “powerful” and “station wagons” in all-caps? I may not toe the Right-Conservative-Libertarian position 100% of the time or even 50% of the time, but I like to think that I don’t have a knee-jerk reflex to back up everything that the Obama Administration serves up, so why do I need to be yelled at in this manner. I also like to think that I listen to reason, that is, if I am not being beat about the head.
I kind of don’t get your complaint about 0-60 times. There has been a lot of advances in engine design since the 1970’s and even since the 1960’s, and sub 8-second 0-60 times seems to be the norm in many lines of cars these days.
As to Diesel engines, they have all manner of problems of their own, ranging from soot out the exhaust pipe to the fuel gelling in winter. Diesel engines have their applications but there are still questions if they are appropriate for widespread use in passenger cars. Also, some of the mileage boost of Diesels is misleading as #2 Diesel has at least 10% more BTU content per gallon, maybe even 15% more relative to the watered-down blends of today.
Finally, what about my reasoning that everything in society involves engineering trades, that I would much rather drive a fuel-efficient if not somewhat slower or smaller car then to be forced to commute by train at considerable tax payer expense. Increased fuel economy of cars is a Good Thing because it kicks the props out of a War on Cars when cars get comparable fuel efficiency to trains?
Paul,
I wasn’t thinking about shouting when I wrote that. I tend to speak that way in person too, with strong emphasis on certain words to make a point. But there is a difference in shouting and emphasis. As this wasn’t JRHS, BFF, mean girls tweet, I didn’t assume anyone would object. And as long as I’ve been commenting here or anywhere on blogs and news outlets, that’s THE first time anyone ever said that.
If you were offended, I retract my caps.
If I wasn’t typing, I’d be flailing my hands around too. Watching news is an aerobic event here some days.
And I don’t ‘object’ to the ‘0 to 60’ standard. But when do we see that in a family car ad now? I’m 58, that was in almost every car commercial when I was a kid. I even remember the sales guy giving my dad that line when he was looking at a 1968, AMC, full sized, 4 door station wagon. That’s why I included that example.
As to diesel vehicles, I’ve never heard that any diesel vehicle got less mileage than a same body sized gasoline run vehicle. I do know about the differences in fuels that you mentioned. I learned all that in gas turbine school in the Navy. And yes that fuel can gel but there are additives. Funky exhaust is a possibility, but I see plenty of big trucks and buses running cleanly. My training taught my most diesels blowing like that need the valves adjusted. So that’s a owner failure not a engine failure in my mind.
I’ve heard both sides of the diesel good, diesel bad conversations. And I always go back to the oil embargo. Back then diesel was supposed to be the be all and end all vehicle fuel. Even if there was exhaust fumes and that black visible smoke, it washed out of the sky when it rained. And unlike gasoline smog, diesel didn’t turn into acid rain or harm the atmosphere. But somewhere, that entire line of thought went away, to be replaced by high mileage gasoline vehicles and continued fighting over how to fix it. I’ve never heard anyone refute what I said about diesel exhaust vs gasoline exhaust.
In fact the two times I questioned an ‘environmental expert’ about that change in attitude, both times I got a lot of weasel worded , you’re thinking is outmoded, and why are you arguing with the experts, please sit down…next question please! And I’ve never seen a study refuting that outmoded thinking either.
But, that was also a time when the ‘experts’ thought we would have global cooling from smoke and pollutants in the atmosphere.
I’m not aware that I addressed the train vs car issue at all. Personally I don’t mix those two means of transport in my thinking. I live in NC, and you can’t get anywhere faster on a train from Central NC than you can driving. We don’t have light rail in my area either. Plus, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t do credit cards, so I can’t take a train anywhere, and rent a car on the other end.
So, I didn’t ignore the train reference, but I didn’t think I addressed it either.
Insanity prevails in the US as well: still no fracking allowed in New State. Even Pennsylvania seems to be catching a bit of the fever…
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/328752/20120416/hydraulic-fracturing-injection-wells-earthquakes-natural-gas.htm
People in the U.S. prefer gasoline powered engines because they attain better volumetric efficiency in a normally aspirated configuration. This provides the smooth delivery of power across a broad midrange of RPM’s that people associate with a “swank ride”. Diesels engines have a stigma of soot, smelly exhaust, high vibrations, and loud knocking noises. I personally don’t give a crap, in fact I purposely made my car louder and stinkier. But there are lots of people that hear the odd clacking of an otherwise normal solenoid operating under the hood and they are taking the car to the dealer complaining of a “weird noise”. Diesels usually need a turbo to help boost that volumetric efficiency so that they will rev with a bit more urgency. But there again that turns a lot of people off because they hear that turbos deliver “peaky power” and overheat then burn out. That is honestly an outdated notion because the latest turbo systems use bearing materials, dry lubricants, and thermal transfer coatings that virtually eliminate turbo lag and cooling issues associate with turbo systems of the past. Not to mention the government has gone overboard with the requirement that diesels in the U.S. must have these complex catalyst systems with urea injectors just for no other reason than to kill the diesel smell out the tail pipe. But you also can’t overlook the fact that refineries that provide domestic fuels are tooled such to heavily favor gasoline production. So it sort of produces of self fulfilling cycle where car manufacturers produce cars that service the predominant fuel source and the refiners produce the fuel source that services the predominant type of engine.