It's A Gas
Clinton and McCain have both backed a gas tax holiday. It's a cheap stunt, and I think most people recognize it as such. Nevertheless, it's small potatoes compared to the bigger energy issues--which I don't see any candidate seriously addressing.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:25 AM
8 Comments:
Obama spent half an hour talking about energy issues in mind-numbing detail with Tim Russert last Sunday on Meet The Press.
Yeah, and I saw it and it was mind-numbing platitudes. Is he going to do anything that makes a serious difference, like drilling in Alaska, or starting up nuclear energy? He just spoke about empty, hopeless plans to magically do everything right far in the future.
Drilling in Alaska? Now, there's a mind-numbing platitude. Let's deplete further a resource that we need to get away from at great financial and environmental expense- sort of like burning down the house to stay warm.
He also spoke as to nuclear energy - that its one of many alternative energy solutions and for the need to have a standard model rather than a different design for each plant. I don't know how much more detail you can get into with Russert- his eyes were misting and he could have lurched into flag pins at any second. I think anonymous was looking for a kiss to nuclear industry and not even the repubs are going to do that
Russert allowed him to get in as much detail as he wanted, since he refused to ask him any hard questions. Rather than embracing nuclear energy--the only known solution to our problem at present that actually works, aside from more oil--Obama kept it at arm's length.
As to drilling, it is the single best solution to our problems right now, dwarfing everything else. Sure, it's a "short term" solution, in that it'll only work for the next few generations (there are more KNOWN oil reserves now than at any time in human history) and nothing else can really work for the next twenty years.
How long was it, again, that the entire known Alaskan reserves would supply our economy? I know it was over a week but less than a year...
Even using the the laughably low estimates of environmentalists who are deadset against any drilling in ANWR (this is just ANWR we're talking about, not all of Alaska), the oil available is a mindbogglingly huge amount.
You don't like the environmentalists' numbers? Ok, let's double the biggest firm recoverable number I can find on the site that is designed solely to advocate drilling the ANWR: let's call it 20 billion barrels total recoverable crude. Mindbogglingly huge indeed. Until you consider that US domestic consumption has been above 20 million barrels per day for a few years now, and the 20 billion would likely only contain limited amounts of the light sweet crude that we use the most of. That means that, at the very, very best, it would last us three years at current consumption rates, and realistically far shorter.
Yes, that's what I said, a mindbogglingly huge amount. Even at the lower estimates, enough to replace Saudi oil for 10 to 20 years.
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