TheHat

Well my 2003 Chevy Suburban, with its 30 gallon tank will keep on truckin, thank you very much!

Funny, isnt Massachusetts a liberal state? Dont liberals constantly hound on people for being greedy and not conservationist enough, yet they are the ones now trying to sell their SUVs?

This is on par with Al Gore flying a jet around the world spreading the GW gospel and then driving to his speech engagements in a "green" vehicle.

This is funny to watch and read.

People need to calm down about all this oil and gas talk. It is still the most efficient and cost effective method we have.

We will get to alternate forms soon enough in time, but patience is a virtue.

All these wonderful thought out scenarios of people traveling on rail, living closer to work (which also means more congestion, jee who would have thunk that?), etc are pipe dreams that will not come to fruition.

Maybe if the government would stop overregulating the industries involved, we could get even cheaper energy, but that would entail allowing citizens the freedom away from government controls which we all know is not beneficial to the government.

Lets see, Liberals talk up a good game of energy independence, yet arenot willing to drill for our own here in the states. So therefore we never get energy independent. Yet somehow, this gets overlooked b/c the enviro wackos, think we should just turn off the oil valves and degress back to the stone age until we get alternate fuels up and running.

Its insane but true.

We might be the 1st country in the history of the world to deprive ourselves of our own natural resources.

Slartibartfas

You seem to live in a simple world, but to be honest, I am already glad when people liberal or not start to sell their SUVs instead of buying them.

Compared to other developed countries however Americans seem to be quite inefficient in using oil, even when your oil consumption is set into relation to your GDP. Inefficiency hardly is a competitive advantage in a global market, unless your working forces are dirt cheap.

Those with "patience" as a virtue will be those who buy the technology from the foreign leaders in technology in this field then. I am not sure if you like that idea.

Those "pipe dreams" already exist in different places. In Vienna more people use the PT than their car, even though we have some problems with suburban sprawl as well. If you have work in the dense city, where actually much of the jobs are concentrated, its no problem to find a reasonably priced apartment not too far off. Its a personal decision if one wants an idyllic family home in the middle of nowhere including the daily tavel odysee or insteaed an urban home where you are not only nearer to work, but also to many services and to urban life style. I am quite hopeful that the trend moves towards the latter again, not just in Vienna but in many parts of the world, especially also in the US.

I am not quite sure how a city of shorter ways leeds to more congestions btw. Short ways, especially in connection with good bicycle and PT infrastructure, mean less dependency on cars. As cars need a vast amount of space, not just for driving but even the more for simply standing around, less cars mean less congestions.
You mean endangering national security (and the question of energy supply clearly is one) for the short sighted benefit of the individual is something one should do?
Energy efficiency is already today extremly bad in the US when compared to other developed countries, with cheap energy it even gets worse. Combine that with the fact that the supply/demand ratio of oil is getting increasingly worse. Both factors together probably would lead to a hard landing of your economy eventually.

You don't get energy independent by that. You just add a few years more to global energy supply. Even in the entirely unrealistic case that you should uncoppling your oil production from the international oil market you still would get yourself not much more than a decade of independence.

As long as you have strategical reserves you can respond to resource blackmailing, after you have wasted them, you can't anymore. That line of thought might provide powerful motivation for current preservation also for those who don't give a fuck about environment.

prrriiide

Not sure why you think Carter was so bad on oil...

Although prices spiked in 1979, they still didn't increase nearly as much percentage-wise as they have in the last 8 years under Bush. Carter had the Iranian crisis to deal with. The price spike pre-dates the hostage crisis by several months, and it was directly due to the seizing of power by Khomeni. Were a political tectonic shift like that (e.g. House of Saud getting overthrown) to happen in the region today, the prices at the pump would be astronomical. In 1978, oil was $1.65/gal (2006 dollars). When Carter left office at the beginning of 1981, gas was $2.63, an increse of ~63%. But at the same time foriegn oil imports were dropping significantly. According to Dr. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain institute, if the US would have kept the same energy conservation policies in place throught the first Reagan term, the US would have been completely off of foreign oil.

Contrast this to what has happened under Bush's watch:

On January 24th 2000, pump prices averaged $1.30 a gallon. May 12th, 2008 the prices average $3.69 - an increase of nearly 184%.

To be fair, look at all 4 years of Carter's Presidency:

Gas prices in 1976 were an average of $1.76/gal. When he left office, as stated, they were $2.63, an increase of just over 49%.

In Bush's first term, prices went from $1.30 to $1.83, an increase of almost 41%. But in his second term (when all of his energy policies have started to work all the way down to the pump) prices have climbed from $1.83 to $3.69, an increase of nearly 101%.

In 1983, the US again started importing increasing amounts of oil, and by 1986, the price stabilized around $1.20 (+/- 10 cents). In 1999, prices were down to around 90 cents a gallon.

In 1999, we hit a recession and prices started climbing again. But unlike previous economic recoveries, the price of gas never started coming down under Bush, and have been increasing at an accelerating pace ever since.

So I'll ask you: who is worse on oil?

__________________
Tax & Spend > Borrow & Spend

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Every feeling you've ever felt can be found in the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner.

Slartibartfas

^^ I think one has to be fair. Bush is at best a side factor for the rise in oil price. The major reason for that is the supply in comparision to the demand which is something the Bush administration could not influence that much.

Even if you blame him for the lower Iraqi oil production, that still is not enough.

The President of the United States of America is not allmighty. In other words, he can not be blamed for something he has not the power to prevent.

prrriiide

He might not have had control over supply factors, but he sure had control over demand factors when he sent Darth Cheney to get his energy policy from the big energy interests that wrote it.

Had he enacted an aggressive alternative energy policy 7 or 8 years ago, we would likely be on the way to energy independence right now. Instead, he had to make sure his energy cronies sucked the economic life of the US before the citizens got pissed off enough to DEMAND a change. Which is where we are headed right now.

His blatant and unabashed cronyism is a big reason why people that are already having desperate trouble making ends meet now have to face food prices climbing at nearly twice the historic rate.

__________________
Tax & Spend > Borrow & Spend

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Every feeling you've ever felt can be found in the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner.

Slartibartfas

But Europe has hardly followed a Bush policy, and sees rising oil prices as well. Of course you may say that Europe is better prepared for those prices. A good sign for that is that the current price levels in the US for fuel would be considered in Europe to be dirt cheap, because in Europe one liter of fuel is used considerably more efficient than in the US.

So you can blame indeed Bush for doing too little or nothing on this field, but the oil price would not be altered too much by that.

prrriiide

I think we may have to disagree.

Had Bush set forth an energy policy that targeted a 20% reduction in America's oil usage between 2001 and 2009, I think you'd see a significant price drop at the pump. Cutting oil usage in Austria by 20% might not do a lot to the worldwide supply/demand effect on oil prices. But in the US, 20% of our usage is a astronomical amount of oil - enough to pull demand back worldwide to a level that would drop pump prices.

__________________
Tax & Spend > Borrow & Spend

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Every feeling you've ever felt can be found in the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner.

Slartibartfas

But its the global demand that is the primary factor behind the global rise in oil prices. The domestic demand of the US should not be underestimated but its only part of that.