Beamwalker, you can count me in on that convoy.

Jim

 

Hohn, with all due respect sir I would not be stealing form the Canadian people as you have led us to believe. It is not illegal for the Canadians to sell the cheaper drugs to us it is just illegal for us to go buy them....now you figure that out if you can.........What say

Jim

 

Spoken like a man who's never driven in the terrible traffic of DC.

You'd never fit even 100K CTD on those roads, never mind 10x that.

 

I meant "stealing" in a different sense. Maybe I should have said "free riding" or "defrauding".

To me, it's the same as the guy who buys an H2 for his "business" and writes it off. Hey, buddy-- we tax payers are SUBSIDIZING your gas-hog H2. You are stealing from taxpayers by using the writeoff loophole.

 

Britt-- sorry I didn't see your post earlier.

It is a catch-22.

I tend to look at things a little simplistically in terms of economics. There is supply and there is demand-- period.

Therefore, the solution to many problems lies in changing supply and demand.

Take the "war on drugs." Making drugs illegal has done nothing to reduce drug use. Supply follows demand. The ONLY way to eliminate the drug problem is for the US to say as a nation that we won't use drugs. If the demand disappears, the problem goes away. So the source of the problem isn't drug dealers-- it's the demand for drugs. The dealers are simply supplying a market need (however immoral it may be), and quite profitably.

So now we go back to oil. What is the role of Gov't to be? What is the role of business?

I tend to think that businesses should be as loosely regulated as possible, because gov't regulation has a bad track record of making things worse, not better.

The oil companies are just meeting a market need. Just as the drug dealer are secondary to the drug demand, so are oil companies secondary to the demand for oil.

A key wrinkle here, though, is that oil is a global commodity, and reducing American oil demand does little to lower the price, because the price is based on WORLD supply.

But there are things the US gov't could, and should do to reduce overall consumption of oil in the US-- and it's not what they've done so far. CAFE and EPA stuff is going about it all wrong.

So here's my list of things that should be done:
1) Provide STRONG incentive to replace oil-heating systems with electric. We can make electricity any number of ways, but you can't make heating oil as many ways. The idea is to reduce/eliminate petroleum.

2) Setup massive wind farms in portions of the US that are sparsely populated. We just setup two wind turbines (just two) here in Cheyenne, WY, and [b]each one] generates 750KW of electricity. Now the whole state of WY has less than 500K people. Why can't we setup up hundreds of these turbines out in pasture land and cattle grazing fields?? WY is very windy, and there's no reason that this state ALONE could generate ALL of its own electricity from wind, with enough left over to power southern MT and northern CO.

3) Convert liquid fuels to renewable-- ethanol and biodiesel are suitable substitutes, with the only drawback to ethanol being you'll want a bigger fuel tank.


We cannot wean ourselves completely from petroleum, at least not yet. Petroleum is also used for things like plastics and cosmetics, and no easy replacement for it yet exists.


But the idea is NOT that we can reduce the world price of oil by reducing American demand. This won't work because we are not the only economy demanding oil.

Rather, the idea is to reduce the IMPACT of high oil prices on our critical infrastructure. We want to minimize American EXPOSURE and VULNERABILITY to high and volatile oil prices.


Unfortunately, the Gov't itself has tied its own prosperity to high oil consumption via fuel taxes. We use less fuel, the gov't gets less money.


Now, show me ANY bureacracy that's content to have LESS money????? Therefore, gov't bureaucracy ENCOURAGES HIGH OIL CONSUMPTION!!

What's wrong with this picture??

jmo

 

If I ever get enough money together to buy some land a couple of small windmills are going to be the first things that are set up. A friend of mine has one freakin windmill on his property in northern CO and it generates all of his electricity, even enough to heat his barn - the cows love that...