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So what exactly is your problem other than that companies existing in a free market economy are making profits?The US has had no petroleum price shock in real terms for the last 25 years.
Does articulate mean shortening names from republicans to repugs? Does comprehension mean talking out your ass without knowing the first thing about the subject?
Europe has a different system of transportation than the US. It has different cars, trains, roads and cities. Is this not true?
Europe has lived with higher gas prices than the US for a longer time. They gradually got this state, it wasn't all of sudden thrust upon them.
Of all the examples I gave where a $2.00 tax on gas would NEARLY double the price, which of those doesn't fit? "shipping, transportation, and all other uses for fuel" is what I said would be greatly effected.
You can't just SAY people will use mass transit or switch their lifestyles if there are NO MEANS AVAILABLE for them to make the switch. How are the poor going to get to work? How are the lower middle class even going to be able to pay for such a huge jump in costs? You can't just stomp the dependancy out like that.
I would agree on some taxing along with tax incentives for alternate/hybrid implemintation and research.
So what exactly is your problem other than that companies existing in a free market economy are making profits?The US has had no petroleum price shock in real terms for the last 25 years.
Bingo.
Iraq is $200Bn and counting.
Think how much research into renewables that would have bought...
Oil wars?
Oh, and I don't disagree about the money for research for alternative fuel options...not at all.
But if ya'll are going to throw around ridiculous things like "oil wars", I guess I could throw in that $3.3 trillion dollars in the last 30 years or so spent by Democrats, leading the war on poverty. But failed to realize the extent of laziness and sense of en lement a lot of them have. Talk about a waste of money....see? I can be ridiculous, too.
Or the war on drugs... or the war on guns... or the war on...
Yep, those *wars* too.
not terror?
That one is just as rediculous, mookie.
Politician's best friend: declaring war on the abstract.
They aren't really wars on terror, mookie, they are wars *for* OIL. Haven't you been paying attention?
not on, for.
sorry, typing too fast....
A war on oil would be funny, though....
Oil wars?
[hilarious picture omitted for brevity]
Don't get me wrong. I am NOT throwing in with the tin foil hat crowd that we went over to Iraq to take their oil and make the oil companies richer.
I DO think that part of the internal reasoning of the ex-oil executives that are our Prez and current VP was that we needed to protect our oil supply from an unstable madman. Cheney said as much in a speech I remember reading shortly before the war. (can't remember where, but I do remember reading the transcript from a reliable source)
Honestly, ensuring a stable energy supply safe from disruption from the formerly huge Iraqi army, would be something that I could agree with.
I just wish that we didn't have to worry about our oil supply as much, that's all.
Me, either. When we use oil like water and don't have any viable alternatives, you have to protect all of your sources...especially from lunatics that live to see us fail. And since we don't have a lot of other options, we'll always be vulnerable. Mother Nature has exposed that vulnerability more effectively than any suicide bomber ever could, IMO.
And one could just as easily say, "How about cut out all of those welfare programs? I resent having to pay for people who refuse to pull their own weight...that money could be far better spent researching better, cleaner, more cost-effective fuel sources."
Damn...did that last part sound like something whottt would say??
And one could just as easily say, "How about cut out all of those welfare programs? I resent having to pay for people who refuse to pull their own weight...that money could be far better spent researching better, cleaner, more cost-effective fuel sources."
One could just as easily say that if we paid down the massive pile of government debt we could do a lot more tax cutting...
See, there's waste every where.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rc...ts_americ.html
- Total U.S. energy use is trending down and has dropped 6 percent from its 2007 peak -- and the total last year was lower than for 1999 (although the economy grew by 25 percent from 1999-2012, adjusted for inflation). This means our factories and businesses are producing substantially more products and value with less energy.
- Electricity sales have declined in four of the past five years, including last year, which is a stunning shift for an industry that saw retail sales double between 1973 and 2000 (three times the rate of population growth). Much of the recent decline results from utility investment in energy efficiency programs –- like helping customers upgrade their lighting and weatherization –- between 2007 and 2012.
- America’s oil use continued its unexpected decline in 2012, down 14 percent from the 2005 peak. In fact, oil use last year was lower than in 1973 (when the nation’s economy was only about a third of its current size). According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), new fuel economy and clean car standards will cut oil consumption in 2025 by 2.1 million barrels per day, which is more than we buy now from any OPEC country.
- U.S. coal use in 2012 was lower than in 1990 and down more than 20 percent from the peak year of 2007. This mostly reflects a shift away from increasingly uneconomic coal-burning power plants, whose air pollution produces more premature deaths than any other form of U.S. or global energy use.
And America’s most productive energy resource is?
As these trends suggest, energy efficiency -- ways of doing more with the same amount of energy – is our most productive resource. And it’s our cleanest and cheapest one, too.
Thanks to all the ways we’ve been stretching our energy dollars over the past four decades we’ve more than doubled the economic productivity of our barrels of oil, kilowatt-hours of electricity, and natural gas therms without even trying very hard. (To see an infographic showing the report's highlights, click here.)
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, energy efficiency’s contribution to meeting growth in our energy needs over that period exceeds that of all other energy resources COMBINED. As a result:
- Total energy per dollar of goods produced is down;
- Gasoline per mile driven, down;
- Cost of energy services (from lighting to refrigeration), down;
- National carbon footprint, down.
- Total energy per dollar of goods produced is down;
- Gasoline per mile driven, down;
- Cost of energy services (from lighting to refrigeration), down;
- National carbon footprint, down.
along with reduction in environmental pollution, nearly all the PROGRESS above has been due to GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS, not the "free market always providing the optimum solution"
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-21-2013 at 10:32 AM.
You call this bad economy... progress...
Why doesn't that surprise me?
the bad economy (for the 99%) is due the long tail of the Banksters' Great Depression, a tail purposely, sociopathically lengthened by the Repugs reducing or blocking all the Dems attemtps to stimulate the economy and job creation.
and the economy is taking a serous hit by Repug assholes like Cruz and Repug-fabricated govt crisis-to-crisis
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