Remember when some dude stood up and gave a couple easy ways to increase fuel efficiency, including inflating your tires to the correct pressure? And remember how they laughed at him and handed out tire pressure gauges? Now they are screaming about high gas prices.
Just a thought for you on this cheery morning.
Dave
He sounds as stupid as that guy who was putting solar panels on the White House in the 70s. What do these guys know about energy conservation?
Because Jesus will always create more oil for us.
beergoggles
Why didn’t u include oil company Q1 profits in that post to drive the point home?
The Republic of Stupidity
Well shitshitshitshitshit…
Carter was talking about this back in the 70’s…
(Yes… I know that’s who put the solar panels on the roof… strangely enough, after reagan took them down, Bush II eventually had them put back up…)
TheMightyTrowel
@Dave: You can tell that peak oil is a liberal lie because liberals and “scientists” say that oil comes from squashed dinosaurs. We all know there weren’t any of these “so-called dinosaurs” in the garden with Adam and Eve. The eternal Oil supply is proof that God loves us.
go JESUS!
[/ christianist moran]
JPL
@Dave: Jesus is unhappy with the southern states. I’m sure Pat Robertson will be commenting shortly about the weather pattern.
zzyzx
This is starting to remind me of my favorite page of the Principia Discordia:
“I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.”
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
“But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.”
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
Dave
@JPL: No…those are Rapture Storms. Our continued use of oil ensures that God’s most devoted children will be welcomed unto his loving embrace first.
R-Jud
What’s the going price of a gallon of milk in the U.S. nowadays? Is it still greater than the price of a gallon of gas? I always thought that gas prices per gallon should be at least twice that of milk, considering the huge production chain involved.
Alex Gurney Halleck-S.
And when Boehner talks about ending the subsidies of oil companies, he’s just riding the populist wave. He’d never really end them.
Just Some Fuckhead
Everyone should be concerned about higher gas prices.
Wag
I won’t fully inflate my tires until he releases his birth certificate!!
Oh, wait…
Now where’s that tire gauge?
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Yeah, cheery thought, since apparently independents are pitching hard right away from Obama because they think he’s to blame for the gas prices. Because, you know, the only reason gas is so high is because Obama, that cretin, isn’t allowing any more drilling offshore, and we all know that such drills would immediately make us energy independent.
Oh, and I forgot, he fakes birth certificates and hates Baby Jeezus too.
Dave
@Just Some Fuckhead: Funny…Holder investigates for two weeks and discovers something. Bush’s DOJ “investigates” for almost a year when this last happened and found nothing. Funny how that works.
James K. Polk, Esq.
But, if I inflate my tires to the correct pressure, the terrorists have already won.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Dave: We can chuckle about it when Holder does something about it.
Dan
Ummm, if Obama was born in Kenya, why is everyone looking for some kind of proof in Hawaii? Shouldn’t they be looking at hospital records in Kenya?
Or are the beaches nicer in Hawaii?
PurpleGirl
@Just Some Fuckhead: It isn’t like the prices didn’t go up right before summer anyway, is it? The companies manipulate the refining process and the timing of the different oil fractions. This has happened for years.
Villago Delenda Est
“Common sense”…which is what doing things like finding alternative energy sources that are not based on extraction technology, and taking steps (like checking tire pressure) to maximize your fuel efficiency…is decidedly uncommon in the United States of America.
Don’t worry…be happy!
Viva BrisVegas
@Dave:
Well he will. Only it will take some time, and it will be made of us.
Dan
@R-Jud: Yeah, but you can’t really drill a cow for millions of gallons of milk.
Wag
@Viva BrisVegas:
FTW
Villago Delenda Est
@Dan:
The point, of course, is not where Obama was born. We’ve established that.
The point is, he’s NEAR. There’s no birth documentation that can ever change that.
Dave
@Just Some Fuckhead: True, but you usually don’t say you found something “disturbing” and then not do anything about it. You just lie and say you found nothing wrong.
honus
Hell, I remember when somebody suggested after 9/11 that maybe we should conserve fuel and Ari Fliescher said ti was the administrations position that driving big SUVs was a part of our “blessed” lifestyle that we should not compromise.
Zifnab
@R-Jud:
I thought that too for a while. But you have to consider that milk is perishable and production (while technically inexhaustible) is tightly limited. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has(had?) a literal ocean of oil under it. All you have to do is drop a well.
It’s the difference between growing a tomato on the vine and visiting the grocery store.
Omnes Omnibus
@Wag: I keep one in my car. Weird thing though, this particular car and set of tires just don’t leak. Fuckers stay at 34 psi all the time.
TaMara (BHF)
The snark has been strong at B-J since the release of the fake musloom-kenyan-sochalish-fashist’s birth certificate. 14 comments in on rising fuel prices and I’ve already spit my coffee twice.
Zifnab
@Dave:
You announce that you’ve found something “disturbing” when you want to deflect blame. Announcing and acting are two very difference actions.
Holder can pronounce the oil companies guilty from on high and then fail to prosecute. That gives the President political cover (hey! those oil companies are jacking with the prices!) without actually confronting the companies themselves and provoking a fight (hey! why did all my campaign donations go away and when did all these pro-oil Congressional investigators start crawling up my ass?)
stuckinred
Any update on the Maggie fund?
Omnes Omnibus
@TaMara (BHF): Now this site is leading to drinking problems. Great.
Comrade Javamanphil
Let’s not forget the uber-patriotic act of idling our car during the entire earth hour. Freedom emissions! (Which should be the title of Jonah Goldberg’s columns, now that I think of it.)
Villago Delenda Est
Osama won the instant that the deserting coward and the Dark Lord overreacted and went all we’re going to smite you with our huge Army.
And then didn’t do that and went after Osama’s hated enemy Saddam instead.
jibeaux
There was an Onion story once about how gas, a nonrenewable resource buried beneath the surface of the earth and mostly found thousands of miles away, was still “inexplicably cheaper than milk from a cow.”
PeakVT
@honus: That was the biggest missed opportunity since I don’t know when.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
my grandpa reagan told me cheap oil forever.
Jennifer
@Just Some Fuckhead: I suspect that him saying he’s found something “disturbing” is intended to have an effect in and of itself.
Who hasn’t known that it’s speculation and market manipulation driving the higher prices since January? And then they really picked up steam when the Libyan rebels launched their attacks against the Gaddafi regime. Libya was to be the excuse. Except…Libyan production hasn’t been curtailed. So the excuse falls rather flat.
My suspicion is that Holder made this announcement with the intent that those responsible would see or hear it and decide that they’d managed to fleece enough extra profit over these past several months and it really isn’t worth it to have the Justice Department breathing down their necks. I could be wrong, but that’s my suspicion. It will be confirmed if we start seeing prices falling within the next week or two.
(If you didn’t read the comments at your link, check them out. It’s no wonder the oil companies see no risk in ripping us off when all the John Galts are out there blathering about how it’s fine and dandy to pay $160 to fill up the SUV since it proves the “free market” is working.)
Villago Delenda Est
Because you managed to de-motivate the millions of individual contributors who gave you small amounts that added up to more than all the corporate contributions that he plane crashing dipshit had?
BR
Yesterday I posted a diary at dkos describing how we’re at a point with energy that we’re really going to have to face some consequences:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/27/970619/-Alternative-energy-wont-save-us-from-Exxon-or-speculators
Alternative energy isn’t going to solve everything, and attacking speculators or oil companies is just pointless scapegoating. Conservation is pretty much the only thing that will help.
Jay C
A handy CHART I found on the ‘toobz: long-tern trends in retail gasoline prices for the last couple of decades. It illustrates a couple of interesting (to me, anyway) points.
1) It reinforces a belief I’ve had that the national dialogue on fuel prices changed irrevocably a few years back (c.2003?) when average pump prices went up above $1.85 a gallon, and the public ignored it (as opposed to previously when 20-30-cent variations would engender outraged editorials and Congressional investigations).
2) I’m sure our short-term attitude HAD to have been affected by that astonishing price drop in 2008 (due to the onset of the Great Recession?) – the recent respite from the trend of ever-higher prices may have led us to believe that prices had “gone back to ‘normal'”. Which of course, was a fluke.
Villago Delenda Est
@BR:
According to the Dark Lord, conservation turns you into a wussy.
gnomedad
@TheMightyTrowel:
Actually, they don’t; fossilized pond scum is more like it.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@BR:
My problem with the alternative energy thing is…we should already be at a place where we could see it as a decent supplement and actual ‘alternative’. But because we were told for years how alternative energy was useless and/or too expensive to try so why bother, we’re just now getting some kind of miniscule attempts to invest in research, and even that is being attacked as ‘oh, so pointless, what returns are there?’.
If we had been actually investing and studying as much as we should’ve been when Carter sounded the alarm way back when, we might actually have something to fucking speak of, but no, it’s all about that lethal Green Fascism and American Exceptionalism that we can’t dare turn away from our proud, oil-soaked way of life.
Jennifer
@BR: It’s not “pointless scapegoating” to call people out – or even, horrors, PUNISH them, for speculation and market manipulation.
That having been said, I’ve filled up exactly 4 times since Jan. 1. Typically, in the same time period, I would have filled up 16 times.
In point of fact, we can do both – go after the speculators and manipulators while at the same time reducing consumption.
joes527
@PeakVT: Oh I dunno.
“The masters of the universe have steered the economy right onto the rocks! Lets’ put everything back the way it was so they can steer us some more”
That one was a pretty big missed opportunity too.
NonyNony
@Dave:
I recall my conservative family members telling me that since Bush was an oil man he knew how to keep gas prices low.
I also recall asking “how the fuck is that supposed to work?” Never did get a good answer.
BR
@Jay C:
What happened then was that the world reached a plateau of oil production – despite claims from Saudi Arabia and others that they had more production capacity, they never seemed to be able to actually pump it. That is, we hit the plateau of peak oil.
We’re now in a likely 3-5 cycle between oil price peaks. Each one will be the partial or sole cause of a recession (as has been the case for the last 6 out of 7 recessions). But unlike in past decades, because we will have less oil each year than the year before, each recovery will get cut off before we even get back to a pre-recession level. That means we’re on a jagged slope down economically from here on out – economic growth as we know it has ended.
Maude
@The Republic of Stupidity:
I think Obama put back solar panels. There was a bit of a dust up because the guy who had the original panels, wanted them back up. I’m not sure if they went with newer panels.
If I’m wrong, oops.
@R-Jud:
The Associasltion of Dairy Herds is about to demonstrate outside your front door.
BR
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
Exactly. John Michael Greer had a great series of posts on this recently – here’s part 3:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/04/alternatives-to-nihilism-part-three.html
(At first glance you wouldn’t think so, but his blog is probably the wisest of all that I read.)
Dave
@NonyNony: Fucking oil prices…how do they work?
Xecky Gilchrist
Remember when some dude stood up and gave a couple easy ways to increase fuel efficiency, including inflating your tires to the correct pressure?
I thought you meant this guy.
Those Bush 1 PSAs were what came to mind for me when the tire pressure kerfuffle rolled around. They were pretty much Bush’s entire domestic energy policy.
R-Jud
@Zifnab:
And then pipe it to a refinery where it undergoes a series of processes to make it usable for automobiles or jets or whatever, and ship it thousands of miles and distribute it to filling stations, all the while being aware that it’s highly flammable and toxic to the environment.
It should cost more than it does. It’s almost $9.00 a gallon here at the moment, and people aren’t driving that much less. I see a lot of SUVs and trucks with “for sale by owner” signs stuck to them on street corners, but people are still driving.
BR
@Jennifer:
Fine, I guess I’ll put it this way. It may prove to have some very temporary, short-term benefit to go after speculators. But the real fundamental issue is that conventional oil production basically hasn’t increased since 2004 while demand has gone up a lot. We’ve been substituting with things that aren’t oil (tar sands, heavy oil, natural gas liquids) but these have less energy than conventional crude (NGL has only 60% the embodied energy). We’re likely to start heading down the depletion slope, and that’s the issue we need to be talking about, not about speculators.
Jennifer
@BR: It doesn’t need to be either/or, particularly when you consider that the ill-gotten gains from speculation/manipulation are being plowed right back into fighting against funding for research and development of alternatives. As they have been for the past 3 decades.
BR
@Jennifer:
The problem is that when we go after a scapegoat or pursue some short-term, short-sighted fix, we take our eye of the ball. Washington really isn’t capable of doing more than one thing on a problem at a time, and putting out a mixed narrative is difficult. Blaming speculators for high prices is a lot easier than explaining the fundamental truth that due the importance of oil and the lack of suitable alternatives, economic growth as we know it has ended.
stuckinred
Look at this video this moron shot of the tornado. He says one thing over and over, “Oh My God”.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jennifer: Another aspect of it is that if there is a crackdown on speculation and abuse and the prices keep rising anyway, which, due to decreasing supply, etc., they will, then it makes it easier to persuade people that there is a real problem and that something must be done about it.
Jay C
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
And even besides the scientific/techological/industrial dismissals of “alternative energy”, we mustn’t forget the concerted efforts by vested-interest types to tie the concept (in a highly negative way) to “alternative lifestyles”: i.e. negative social stereotyping. The notion that conserving/using less energy was the concern mainly of longhair-freak hippie types living in yurts by candlelight, or affluent Marin Country eco-snobs who were the only ones who could afford “green” cars or whatever, and looked down on the grubby proles in their gas-guzzlers. Oh yeah, and Al Gore is a fat energy-hog, so there!
@BR:
You’re right about that “depletion slope”, but in the meantime, the market speculation doesn’t help: if reining it in – even a little bit – can stabilize the price trends*, it will be more than a little helpful.
*note “stabilize price trends”, NOT “stabilize prices”: I wonder if the latter will even BE possible in the near future.
Earl Butz
I no longer inflate my tires. I just spray them with the same shit that Trump uses on his hair.
The mileage has gone up 20%, but the ride is brutally harsh. I don’t know exactly what they’re putting in the Donald’s hairspray, but it turned the rubber into something that more resembles granite.
Dan
@R-Jud: How do we do it? Quantity!
BR
@Jay C:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think it also, despite what GOPers will say, that tapping the SPR during times of high prices is smart, because then we have to fill it back up when prices are low, so in effect it will dampen price swings, at least domestically.
PeakVT
@joes527: Yeah, but if we ever reach Peak Banker, it will be a good thing. Peak Oil – not so much.
Just Some Fuckhead
I hope the steely-eyed realists of Balloon Juice have disabused you of your fantastical notions of justice, Dave.
Jay C
@BR:
Agreed: if for no other reason than to depress the worst of price “spikes”, and keep the trends more even.
Theoretically true, but a minor problem with this is that prices may never be “low”: the demand levels from “outside” (still less domestically) aren’t going to subside long-term, and market prices may be on an irreversible rise: so the next “fillup” for the SPR is, like for the rest of us with our vehicles, going to cost even more.
PeakVT
@BR: Tapping the SPR only makes sense if the price spike is temporary. If the spike isn’t actually a spike, then it’s a really bad idea.
Triassic Sands
But, but, but…if only we could drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge gasoline would be 79.9 cents a gallon. And if Donal Trump were president, he’d go to all those whiny-ass caribou and tell them, “Hey, we’re Amurka, and you guys just need to shut up and quit complaining.” And, poof, like that, suddenly the caribou are thriving like never before.
And if Donald Trump were president, he’d go to them there AY-rabs and tell them, hey, we’re Amurka and if it weren’t for us you wouldn’t have any oil at all and either you lower your prices or we’re going to take our internal combustion engines and go home. Take that, you camel-riding, not from the greatest country in the history of history evil-doers.
And suddenly, gas drops to 29.9 cents a gallon and even Barack Not-Born-in-America Obama is begging Trump to agree to be King of Amurka forever. Because, man, the solutions are all so easy. I mean, you just say, hey, we’re Amurka, and the rest of the world falls in line.
BR
@PeakVT:
Every price spike is temporary given the sensitivity of our economy to high oil prices. (Per James Hamilton and others, we’ve been at or past that threshold now for a few months.)
So inevitably high prices lead to lower prices, though the long-term trend is up. Tapping the SPR can dampen the swings in price, which helps reveal the true trend to businesses and individuals.
Jager
A client bought a Chevy Volt (sold his E Class Benz) and is over the fucking moon happy with it, he told me yesterday he has used exactely 2.75 gallons of gas in the last two months. His commute is around 15 miles each way and he hasn’t noticed much of an increase in his electric bill either. We drove to lunch in the Volt and it has the nicest interior I’ve ever seen in a GM car.
Comrade Dread
Because the only acceptable solution to high gas prices is to repeal all safety regulations and let oil companies drill anywhere they damn well please, and if shit happens, well, fuck you. It’s your own damn fault for choosing to live above our precious, precious oil.
negative 1
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t even have tires – I just drive around on four rims kickin’ up sparks down the road. Why? Cause f&ck those commie lib dems!!!
Ed Drone
@TaMara (BHF):
Make better coffee!
HTH
Ed
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: They let him get away at Tora Bora, because they wanted him around as a convenient bogeyman & they were afraid of what beans he could spill about the elites here being stuck up the asses of the House of Saud if we indeed captured him & put him on trial.
chopper
@BR:
the undulating plateau, that is. what’s really fun is, each spike in oil prices chops down the segment of the economy that relies on cheap stuff. our economy gets whittled down bit by bit, year by year.
bago
Nah. Hedging and price speculation is cool, because it is about the only way people are going to understand how expensive it is to fight a war to secure oil contracts for corporations that don’t pay taxes. *cough* BP.
chopper
@stuckinred:
i’d be saying a lot more than that. then again, i’m not stupid enough to get that close to a huge tornado, much less in my fucking car.
dianne
Isn’t that the same dude who warned us that climate change would lead to increasing severe weather events? You know, like 200 mile an hour F-5 tornados 1 and 1/2 miles wide on the ground for one hundred miles? You know, the fat guy.
Mother Nature seems to be mainly going after the red states.
chopper
@dianne:
one hundred, try three hundred. the twister that hit tuscaloosa and birmingham kept going on. they’re going to have to check the ground track, but the radar image showed a clear hook echo from MI to SC, possibly all the way to NC. if that was one tornado we’re looking at a new longevity record, beating even the tri-state. that fucker’s going down in the history books.
TheF79
Lutz Kilian at U of Mich has a working paper that separates out the effects of a) supply shocks, b) demand shocks, and c) speculative behavior on oil prices (using a structural VAR model if you’re interested). He finds (fairly persuasively IMO) that the 2003-2008 run-up in prices is not at all attributable to a) supply shocks or c) speculative behavior, and instead is driven almost entirely by b) demand shocks (i.e. China and our own infatuation with driving). If this is truly is the case, drill baby drill would have done (and will do) fuck-all (which Kilian also shows), and going after “speculators” would have been futile as well – basically “Drive Less!” is the only way prices are going down.
gex
@JPL: No matter how red and Christian an area that is struck by natural disaster, it is always the fault of the gays. They are quite comfortable with the idea that God will punish the US if we become more supportive of gays. They are more than happy to believe in a God that punishes innocent people for what gays do.
gex
@R-Jud: Our agriculture is so petroleum dependent, I think that it’s impossible for a gallon of gas to cost more than a gallon of milk, simply because we use more of the former to make the latter.
catclub
@PeakVT: “Tapping the SPR only makes sense if the price spike is temporary. If the spike isn’t actually a spike, then it’s a really bad idea.”
Actually, my suspicion is that they can put oil IN the SPR but will not be able to get it back out.
The best subsidy ever for the oil companies!
And the reason why they say they will only tap te SPR if there is an emergency.
(And if you are interested, my tinfoil hat is a beautiful sky blue – camoflage.)
DBrown
Peak oil is an issue and I too believe we are getting close enough for it to be a concern within five years. Still, I think that deep-water sources and unconventional sources (hear us Canada, land of arctic lands turned into open tar sands for US SUV’s) will buy more time as the Saudi’s continue their slow decline (and far more rapid in three to four years.)
catclub
@BR: My favorite _if only_ about gas prices is how much better off we would have been with a 2 cents per year increase in the gas tax — starting thirty ( now thirty FIVE) years ago.
gex
@Jennifer: This. GS lobbied for changes in restrictions to how oil could be traded. Last time gas was at $4, a barrel of oil was being traded, on average, 27 times. Take about 20 people (and their profit) out of the process of getting the oil from there to here, and you get decidedly lower gas prices.
@NonyNony: So we aren’t the only ones with a “bully pulpit” delusion, huh.
Jay C
@gex:
Yes, the wingnut TV-preacher types always seem to come up with the same response to virtually every natural disaster: It’s God doing the smiting, and when He smites “blue” states it’s because they’re not religious*; and when He smites “red” states, it’s because they’re not religious enough . One smite fits all…
*or gay-hating: to most of these loons the terms are interchangeable…
Xenos
@Villago Delenda Est:
That ‘NEAR’ acronym is not in the lexicon, nor does google reveal its meaning. Define, please, because “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous” is probably not the correct answer.
Edit: or is this something from Blazing Saddles, like “the Sheriff is a ni-(KLANG)!”?
dianne
When I lived in the south, there would always be the one house that survived intact and that person would always say God protected him – I guess because he was so special. And I always thought that God must have hated the child across the street who wasn’t so lucky. Creepy, creepy people.
chopper
@Xenos:
see blazing saddles.
Citizen_X
@chopper:
Wow! All the way from Michigan?
I kid. Mississippi is MS. And it’s not funny.
And while all those storms are hammering and drowning the southeast, down this way, Texas is on fire for lack of rainfall. It’s almost as if the climate were…changing…or something.
Joseph Nobles
Heard on C-SPAN that America’s energy efficiency ratio was around 36%. That’s right, 64% of the energy we produce isn’t actually used for any work. We idle it out in traffic jams, we lose it out of water heaters and lights on in rooms we aren’t in. It is indeed ludicrous that something so small as keeping our tires aired up properly would affect our energy consumption so much, but the joke is on us.
singfoom
@BR: You might have already addressed this, but I’m going to object to the idea that we shouldn’t hype alternative energy.
Here’s the one thing that gets me, the largest use of electricity is in the home. We lose energy during transmission from generation to home. Therefore, we could conserve a TON of energy by not transmitting so far.
So then, the idea is one of generation at the location of usage. IE, Solar fucking panels on every building where the sunlight concentration makes sense.
Now, that would make a huge difference. Once I have an actual house, I plan to put in a robust solar system with a flowback meter and any energy I don’t use will flow back into the grid and the power company has to pay me.
If we really wanted to address the energy problem, we’d be doing distributed generation everywhere.
It seems like a no-brainer to me. Couple that with electric cars and fuck gasoline prices…
chopper
@Citizen_X:
i’ll MISS…your face with my…fist. shut up!
trollhattan
I overinflate my tyres because I’m hording air to drive up the price. Suck on that, hippies!
trollhattan
@singfoom:
California’s energy consumption has been essentially flat for decades despite adding tens of millions in population, due to increasing efficiency. PV solar pricing is drifting downward (although still pretty darn expensive) and becoming more tempting with time. 300+ sunny days/year where I live.
There are so many ways to increase any home’s efficiency, as a defence against galloping energy prices it’s the best place to begin. Direct a small portion of the coal-oil-gas-ethanol-nuclear subsidies there and make a much bigger dent in our energy future.
Naaaah.
singfoom
@trollhattan: What drives me nuts is why we can’t couple a large increase of solar panels (especially the advanced kind) like from Nanosolar or the other and a jobs program.
Really high unemployment? How about a energy efficiency / solar panel WPA program that puts people to work investing in our infrastructure. First do all public buildings, then work out a private/public partnership to help out privately owned buildings.
Update building codes to mandate energy generation as part of the building, starting with a certain percentage or energy spot and slowly amping that upwards.
Everybody wins….
Mandramas
@singfoom: Tell the words “WPA program” to the budget’s vigilants, and ear the screams. In other news, chinese are adding 100.000 alternative energies job each year.
singfoom
@Mandramas: Yeah, I know the budget vigilantes would scream. Maybe make it tax incentives to provide public private partnerships instead of direct funding, that might make them scream less.
Either way, distributing our energy generation all across the grid all over the nation, especially in commercial buildings will lower energy costs and provide savings to private companies, spurring growth since they won’t need to pay such large energy costs.
Oh well, rational and sane energy policy is beyond is with so many Senators/Representatives job’s depending on them not understanding real solutions….
Chris
@singfoom: Actually, electricity transmission is one of the most efficient parts of the system, by far. It’s electricity generation, at the source, where we lose most of the energy (again by far): on average, when we use 100 joules of energy at the generation source, we get about 40 joules of electric energy into the transmission system. In other words we lose 60% of the energy right at the get-go.
Part of this is physics: there’s an upper limit on heat-to-electricity conversion, and in general we do a decent job of approaching the upper limit. The solution is really rather blindingly obvious though, and it’s just what you suggest: generate electricity closer to the point at which it will be used. In fact, generate it directly on site, at office buildings and apartment complexes and so on.
It’s not that this is any more efficient (we will still convert more than 50 percent of the total energy to heat), but rather that, at these places, we also want heat: we want hot water, we want heat in the winter, and we want air conditioning (which rather paradoxically can be done through heating: think back to ammonia cycle refrigerators in the 1800s for instance; modern methods are different but the principal is the same).
In other words, instead of saying “gosh we’re stuck with throwing away half the energy due to physics”, let’s say “gosh look at that, we need half the energy as heat and by gum that’s what we’ve got!”
singfoom
@Chris: Fair enough. I’m not schooled enough in physics, but I get what you’re saying in terms of generation vs. transmission.
Right, a smart system for providing energy on a building would also use that heat waste and input into a cooling/heating solution. If we went nation wide and retrofitted every single possible building with more efficient insulation + energy generation, you could get to a point where power plants are less and less necessary…..
BH in MA
I spent my last several fillups (about 10 weeks) wondering why I was only getting about 30mpg instead of the usual 38 or so. The tires all looked fine. When I finally bothered to check with the pressure gauge, all four tires were around 20psi instead of 35 or so. But they all looked the same so I didn’t notice. Now they’re all pumped up and I’m getting 100 miles per quarter tank again. Also, in my defense the tire pump at the gas station was completely covered with snow until late March.
Robert Hagedorn
Ever wonder what Adam and Eve actually did? Do a search: The First Scandal. Then click. Just once.