Mallard Fillmore has it right. Now that Obama has won, the striptease begins as he peels one layer after another off his moderate disguise, revealing the naked leftist underneath.

Remember during the debates, Obama promised an “all of the above” approach to energy independence? Well that was then, sucker. He had to say that when high gas prices had voters in a lather, and polls showed that Americans favored drilling our own oil.

But now?

He will overturn a ban on embryonic stem cell research and prevent oil drilling in sensitive areas.

Obama’s stance should come as no surprise, given the clues he left behind as we posted here in August.

As oil prices zoomed toward an unheard of $147 a barrel this summer, it seemed every analyst prediction that oil would approach $200 was a self-fulfilling prophecy, until suddenly it was not.

Instead of $200, oil is now $80. Instead of going up, the U.S. has seen the greatest destruction in demand since the oil-shocked 1970s. Drivers have dramatically cut down on driving since November.

Supply. Demand. Prices. Y’know how that works.

“It’s just amazing that the market gets suckered into this,” said analyst Stephen Schork of the Schork Report, who called the idea of $150 a barrel oil “an obscene number, a perverted, illogical number.”

David Fyfe, an analyst with the International Energy Agency in Paris, was a bit less critical, avoiding the word “suckered.”

“To be fair, there is always a tendency in parts of the analyst community to look at short-turn trends and assume it’s something that will continue in perpetuity,” he said.

Shucks, anyone can do that. Are you experts being paid the big bucks to be smarter than that?

Vladimir Putin must be mighty put out — after all, he was feeling his oats with all that oil wealth. Now what?

By 2013, utilities will be able to order a nuclear power generator and have it trucked to their site. Via Instapundit:

 The Hyperion Power Generation uranium hydride reactor will weigh fifteen to 20 tons, depending on whether you’re measuring just the reactor itself or the cask—the container that we ship it in—as well. It was specifically designed to fit on the back of a flatbed truck because most of our customers are not going to have rail. It’s about a meter-and-a-half across and about 2 meters tall. It will generate 27-30 Megawatts of electrical power from 70 MW of thermal power.

This means 0.5 to 0.75 tons per MWe for the nuclear reactor. The steam turbine to convert the power is counted separately. Using a lot less material (including 10 to 20 times greater efficiency with the Uranium fuel) means that the uranium hydride reactor can be scaled to provide more power. Eventual use of advanced thermoelectrics instead of steam turbines would mean that the weight of the reactor and power conversion would be less than one ton per MWe.

Last night’s dreary 90 minutes illustrated why so many people respond to Sarah Palin: she speaks English, not wonkish.

McCain blew an opportunity to nail Obama on Fannie Mae. His answer came off as nyah-nyah-nyah. It was a sloppy job of explaining the situation.

Here’s how — my imagination, folks — Sarah Palin would have put it:

Back in the Clinton days, Democrats began leaning on lenders to make “sub-prime” loans to poor people and minorities. Sub-prime is politician talk for risky. 

Clinton and them, they all had their hearts in the right place. We all want everyone to live well, to own their home, to have a financial stake in their neighborhoods.

But risky means some loans won’t get paid back. Now, you’ve all heard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two quasi-government agencies that were not just busy buying up these risky loans, but pushing lenders to make even more of them.

And Fannie was run by Democrats, many of whom got rich. Franklin Raines walked away with $90 million after cooking Fannie’s books. He was forced out. You’d think he’d be hanging his head in shame, like those guys from Enron, but no, he was advising Obama on housing issues.

As early as April 2001, President Bush and key Republicans warned about the looming sub-prime disaster. They wanted to regulate Fannie and Freddie, but key Democrats threw a fit. One Democrat got so mad, he accused Republicans of “lynching.” Fannie and Freddie also threw a lot of money into their campaign coffers.

Now, for the past two weeks, Barack Obama has been blaming the financial crisis on Republicans who refused to regulate. It takes a special kind of brass to peddle that whopper, but with the New York Times and other media covering for him, why not?

But if Obama can’t honestly diagnose the cause, how can he honestly expect us to believe he can find a cure? Oh, and by the way, Obama collected the second most money from Fannie and Freddie.

Weirdomatic has a collection of  images of power plants, ranging from the oldest hydro-electrical plant in Austria to futuristic solar and nuclear facilities.

Live Science:

Wind energy might be the simplest renewable energy to understand. Yet there are misconceptions about what makes the wind industry turn.

The United States now has nearly 17,000 megawatts of wind power installed, which can supply about 1.2 percent of the nation’s demand for electricity, according to a recent report from the Department of Energy (DOE).

With these numbers projected to grow in the coming years, it might be good to be aware of a few myths that are blowing in the wind.

Read on.

Then there’s this about nuclear power from breeder reactors, a technology invented in the US but banished from our shores by the hysterical left.

How long uranium can supply nuclear power is affected by the kinds of nuclear reactors that are used (Breeder reactors are sixty times more efficient in using nuclear fuel than current reactors) and the sources of uranium that are used and whether thorium can be used to supplement uranium (Thorium can be turned into uranium in a nuclear reaction).

Uranium from Phosphate
Old and new uranium from phosphate mines are starting up or being restarted. Uranium from phosphate is not included in the current uranium reserve estimate of 5.5 million tons at $80/kg or less and could add another 22 million tons of Uranium. Reserves estimates are still increasing and exploration spending is less than one billion dollars per year.

Thorium is more abundant than Uranium and would extend nuclear fuel supplies
Thorium Power is commercializing thorium fuel rods that can be placed in existing nuclear reactors. Full size thorium/uranium fuel rods going into Russian VVER-1000 reactor by 2010. Thorium, U-235 and zirconium mix. Would allow refueling to occur every 4 years instead of every two years. This would reduce operating downtime for nuclear reactors. India is also commercializing thorium as a fuel for nuclear reactors as a blanket around a fast breeder reactor.

Breeder Reactors - Russian dominance
Russia’s BN-600 breeder reactor has been working since 1981 and generated by itself more commercial electrical power than all world solar power over the same period. BN-600 generates about 3800 GW·h/year, which is over 25 times bigger than Nevado One (one of the largest solar thermal electricity generator plants)

Google and General Electric have announced a partnership aimed at upgrading the United States electric power grid and pushing forward the development of renewable energy. The companies plan to conduct a joint lobbying effort in Washington to encourage the government to invest in developing a “smart grid,” and will also work together on projects like geothermal energy systems and integrating plug-in electric cars into the grid. The deal combines each company’s strengths: GE will make the hardware — from wind turbines to metering switches, and Google will make the software — applying network technologies to the grid [Portfolio].

The announcement follows a speech given two weeks ago by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which he laid out a blueprint for how the United States could switch over to generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030, while also eliminating half of the gasoline-powered cars from the roads. While Google hasn’t offered to follow through on that comprehensive proposal, which carried the hefty price tag of $2.7 billion, the partnership with GE seems to indicate that Google wants to put many of its suggestions into practice.

How does fighting political corruption in Alaska affect gas prices? This July 11 interview with Investors Business Daily sheds plenty of light:

Palin: Alaskans are frustrated because there is opposition in Congress to developing our vast amount of natural resources. We want to contribute more to the rest of the United States. We want to help secure the United States, and help us get off this reliance of foreign sources of energy.

It’s a very nonsensical position we’re in right now. We send President Bush and Secretary (of Energy Sam) Bodman overseas to ask the Saudis to ramp up production of crude oil so that hungry markets in America can be fed, (and) your sister state in Alaska has those resources. But these lands are locked up by Congress, and we are not allowed to drill to the degree America needs the development.

When we became a state 50 years ago, we struck a deal with the federal government where we said, “Let us in a union where we will be as self-sufficient as possible.” And the federal government said, “Come in, you’ll be our 49th state, and you’ll do it by developing your God-given resources.”

Fifty years later . . . we’re living up to our end of the bargain, and now we need the rest of the U.S. to live up to their end of the bargain, to lead America toward energy independence. Alaska should be the leader of an energy policy that gets us there.

IBD: Why does Alaska find it so hard to be listened to? The state’s senators have tried many times to get legislation through that would allow drilling, and they’ve been shot down every time.

Palin: There are great misconceptions about the developments up here. Take ANWR. The misperception is that this is a huge swath of pristine land, full of mountains and rivers and wildlife. Those are the pictures seen on TV. But what we’re talking about with ANWR is a 2,000-acre plot of land that is a smaller footprint than LAX or big airports outside Alaska.

It’s not mountainous, and there aren’t rivers flowing through it. So even the perception of what ANWR would entail is wrong, and we need to correct that.

But even more important than explaining the geography and physical aspects of this plot of land is that I have to show that Alaska will have the prudent oversight that Alaskans and Americans will expect as we develop our natural resources.

Here in Alaska we love our clean air and our clean water and our abundant wildlife. We will protect Alaska. I’m a Republican, and when I got elected, some accused me of being anti-development. I created a new office to just concentrate on oversight of resource development on the North Slope.

We’re putting our money where our mouth is. We’re budgeting for strict oversight so we can prove to the rest of the U.S. that we will have safe, clean developments and will do this responsibly (and) ethically.

IBD: Does the rest of the U.S. have reason to doubt you?

Palin: In the past, Alaska’s reputation didn’t lead the rest of America to believe we were adamant about safe, clean, responsible development here.

I say that because we had legislators who are now serving prison time because they were found guilty of being corrupted for their votes on oil and gas taxes by oil and gas industry players. That reputation has really hurt Alaska, and it’s no wonder that some have not wanted to believe that we are opening a new chapter in Alaska’s life.

IBD: What’s your best assessment of Alaska’s ongoing oil and gas potential and especially how much can be gotten from ANWR?

Palin: There are billions of barrels of oil underneath the ground up there on the North Slope including ANWR. In Alaska alone we can supply seven years of complete crude-oil independence, and eight years’ supply of natural gas for Americans with ANWR (and) other areas of Alaska that we want to allow for development. That’s proof that Alaska can be a significant player in the world market.

IBD: How long will it take to develop these areas? Critics say five to 10 years.

Palin: ANWR would take five years to begin providing crude oil to our pipeline. But you have to consider that if we’d started this five years ago, then we wouldn’t be in this position right now. And who knows where we’re going to be in another five years.

There are even bigger sources of crude than ANWR . . . such as offshore areas like the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea. Congress can help us with those areas right now, bringing even more energy than ANWR and bringing it quicker.

We frequently find ourselves at the mercy of those who think that we must be protected from ourselves. Shell is up here wanting to drill offshore, but they’ve been fighting various environmental groups through the 9th Circuit Court and are running into very fierce pushback. In this area, Congress could help us with the development and bring those sources of energy to market quicker than ANWR.

IBD: Some politicians and presidential candidates say we can’t drill our way out of our energy problem and that drilling in ANWR will have no effect. What’s your best guess of the impact on prices?

Palin: I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem or that more supply won’t ultimately affect prices. Of course it will affect prices. Energy being a global market, it’s impossible to venture a guess on (specific) prices. We never would have thought oil would reach $140. Only a few months ago, we thought $100 would be the peak. And here it is at $140 (with) no end in sight.

It’s very difficult to determine, but we do know the demand is going to continue to increase. The demand in Asia especially is one reason why prices are going to increase. But if I could predict energy prices, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.

In 1993, when a gallon of gas cost about $1.10, President Clinton and the Democrat party favored increasing the federal gas tax by 50 cents–a massive price increase.

It never happened, but the urge to make gasoline more expensive has never faded. As prices shot up to $4.60 a gallon this summer, Democrats fumed histrionically about the prices while blocking all practical efforts to reduce prices.

Obama let it slip in June when he said, “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment” in gas prices. Not lowering the cost, but phasing the increase in a little at a time, perhaps so voters wouldn’t notice.

Deroy Murdock noticed something in a bill (S 115) that Obama sponsored in Jan 2007. Most of the bill made sense — repealing tax breaks given to the oil industry in 2005, tax breaks that President Bush argued against himself.

But the sneaky part of his bill included a clause that would set back the technology of oil exploration.

To plan a long and challenging journey, would you reject Mapquest and GPS and only consult an atlas from the 1970s? Unlikely. But to pinpoint America’s offshore oil deposits, Congressional Democrats, starting with Senator Barack Obama, love disco-era maps. Despite his conditional, latter-day support for limited offshore drilling, Obama is the sole sponsor of legislation that would block geological research to locate offshore oil.

Federal officials currently employ estimates based primarily on two-dimensional, black-and-white maps that oil-industry surveyors produced in the 1970s and furnished to the Interior Department. Since 1981, Congressional appropriations amendments effectively have barred Interior from financing or permitting survey expeditions — particularly and precisely in the 85 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf where oil production and exploration are verboten.

In 2005, Congress mandated new, quintennial inventories, then gave Interior six months and $0.00 to assess how much oil and natural gas undergird the 1.76 billion-acre Outer Continental Shelf — a laughably impossible task.

“They couldn’t even board a research vessel,” explains a congressional staffer who studies these issues. Interior’s “paper inventory,” the aide adds, “examined Canadian and West African coastal data, imagined where those sediments pooled before the Continental Drift, then extrapolated to guesstimate what’s off our Atlantic coast today.”

The resulting document states: “Resource estimates are highly dependent on the current knowledge base, which has not been updated in 20 to 40 years for areas under congressional moratorium. . . . ” Translation: “We have no idea what’s really out there.”

Obama’s “Oil SENSE Act” would repeal the 2005 Energy Policy Act’s authorization of these inventories. Introduced in January 2007, S.115 would leave decision makers with Carter Administration maps drawn with pre-PC technology. This is like engineering a Space Shuttle mission with slide rules.

Obama’s bill would prohibit expanded use of 3-D, color seismic techniques that locate and measure underwater oil deposits — even though those tools are in wide use where offshore drilling is allowed, such as the western Gulf of Mexico. In October 1999, President Clinton’s Energy Department evaluated the environmental quality of 1970s’ 2-D equipment against last decade’s 3-D technology. With the latter, Energy concluded, “Overall impacts of exploration and production are reduced because fewer wells are required to develop the same amount of reserves.” In 1970, 17 percent of offshore wells struck oil. By 1997, that figure was 48 percent.

Obama’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Drill policy spurns these marvels and embraces outdated information gathered with obsolete instruments. This is the audacity of ignorance.

Adults should not make decisions in willful obliviousness. Democrats like Obama prefer not to know what riches rest off America’s coasts — since, from their perspective, only bad things can arise politically from finding good things scientifically. They resemble kindergartners who cover their ears and hum loudly to muffle their parents’ unwelcome words.

Follow the link to see the difference in imaging technologies, the modern versus the crude methods Obama’s bill would have mandated.

Much about Obama is a cipher. Here’s a detail that reveals the devil.

HT: Betsy’s Page

Moonshine?

The moon is once again a popular destination, as several space-faring nations are talking about setting up bases there. One reason would be to mine fuel for future fusion reactors.

The fuel in this case is helium-3, a lighter isotope of the helium used in balloons. In high energy collisions, helium-3 fuses with other nuclei to release more energy and less waste than the reactions in traditional nuclear reactors.

“If we can show that we can burn helium-3, it is a much cleaner and safer energy source than other nuclear fuels,” said Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Just 40 tons of this stuff has enough potential energy to meet the total U.S. electricity demand for a year.  However, there is almost no helium-3 on Earth. The closest supply is on the moon.

With two-thirds of Americans favoring drilling at home, it was only a matter of time. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday night dropped her staunch opposition to a vote on offshore oil drilling in the House.

Republicans, reacting to high gas prices, have demanded a vote on additional oil exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf, where drilling is currently blocked by a moratorium. Until now, Pelosi (D-Calif.) has resisted the idea as a “hoax.” But in an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, she indicated that she was open to a vote.

 

“They have this thing that says drill offshore in the protected areas,” Pelosi said. “We can do that. We can have a vote on that.”

Congress has decreed the demise of the incandescent light bulb by 2012. They are to be replaced with CFLs — those Dairy Queen ice cream shaped bulbs that cost more, last longer, cannot be dimmed and contain mercury.

They are also a fraud when it comes to light output. The 23-watt CFLs are touted as equal to a 100-watt incandescent. Until today, I blindly believed this. (I’ll add that I was an early adopter of CFLs and have them in most lamps where they’ll work or fit.)

When my wife and I bought a new torchiere lamp, we put in a 23-watt CFL. It seemed dim, so I bought a 120 watt equivalent, which seemed dimmer.

Curious, I got out my light meter and compared the 23 watt CFL, rated at 100 watts, with a real 100-watt incandescent light bulb. The incandescent bulb puts out twice as much light.

I hate it when people lie to me. I hate it when Apple claims ridiculous battery life for its iPods. But I especially hate it when meddlesome Congressional dim bulbs force me to use something inferior.

Caveat: I only tested one brand of CFL (from Costco). Others may output more light, but I doubt it. Anyone else with a light meter, pleasure measure your bulbs and let me know.

The global warming cult was amusing at first — all those earnest people throwing the word planet around. But now they’re doing real damage with their junk science, all the while wrapping themselves in the flag of righteousness.

Charles Krauthammer observes how Nancy Pelosi — who this week told an interviewer she’s obstructing domestic oil drilling because ”I’m trying to save the planet” — is advancing policies that will only make it worse.

…has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium’s effects on the planet?

Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it’s 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?

Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi’s no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage.

Is thinking through the consequences of feel-good policies too much to ask of liberals? Rhetorical question, that.

If you think the left puts global warming concerns ahead of politics, think again.

At least in India, the leftwing is trying to derail a deal to bring nuclear power, which is cheap and generates no greenhouse gases, to India via an agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

US President George W Bush has urged India’s Prime Minister Manmahan Singh to push ahead with a controversial deal on nuclear power between the two countries in the wake of a key confidence vote in New Delhi.

The issue has divided opinion as supporters argue it is the only way to keep pace with the energy demands of India’s fast-growing economy. But many remain deeply suspicious of a deal they fear will cede too much influence to America.

Opposition forced a vote-of-confidence, which the ruling party won handily.

The vote was triggered after the government’s left-wing allies withdrew their support for the nuclear deal struck with the US in 2005. The pact will give India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, access to US nuclear technology and fuel for civilian use. In return, India’s civilian nuclear facilities would be opened to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Those in favour of the deal argue it will help meet India’s escalating energy demands:

“Our economy has been growing at a rate of 8-9% over the last decade,” says Vishal Budda, an engineer from Delhi. “We simply need nuclear energy to keep the momentum running.”

Yet many Indians are suspicious of America’s interest as well as its intentions.

“This deal will just make us a junior partner of the U.S.,” says Vikram Mittal, President of the Haryana Student Federation of India. “America is trying to hijack our foreign and national policies. First it will be the nuclear deal, then it will be agricultural deals, then education- before we know it we will be another puppet of the U.S.”

Paranoia runs deep, eh? And, with all affection for India, and I have plenty, becoming junior partner would be a promotion. This is still the Third World.

India is under pressure from Washington to sign the accord before the U.S. presidential elections in November. Some think this pressure is an indication that America will be the real winners from this agreement.

“This deal will generate over 100 billion dollars worth of business for the U.S,” says Bhadra Kumar, a left-wing diplomat. “And it will also give them more power to maintain there dominance over the Muslim world if India is a close ally. But what do we get? Expensive power when our people are already going hungry.”

Many on the left suspect the deal has nothing to do with India’s energy needs.

Does the following remark not remind you of Pelosi, Schumer et al?

“Nuclear power provides only 3 per cent of India’s current energy and this will not change massively in the near future,” says Mohammed Thallath, student of International Relations. “We have an abundance of natural resources here as well as energy security through the supply of gas from Iran. No, this is all about money - it may generate business for India but more importantly it will generate massive kickbacks for the politicians.”

Because nuclear energy plays a small role today that’s a reason to not develop nuclear power for tomorrow? Whew.

IBD:

It’s bad enough that Rep. Pelosi refuses to embrace reality, evaluate facts and oversee meaningful debate. But the hissy fits she throws against President Bush and the Republican minority are worse yet. This is a sad situation.

Pelosi’s reaction to Bush’s lifting of the ban on offshore drilling is a perfect example. She called the action a giveaway of “more public resources to the very same oil companies that are sitting on 68 million acres of federal lands they’ve already leased.”

The key phrase is “public” resources — not Democratic resources or Pelosi’s resources — and polls clearly show Americans are behind coastal drilling. The speaker knows that.

Her demonizing of Big Oil doesn’t make sense, either. The companies want to get oil out of the ground. Their exploratory technology is very effective, and they’re drilling extensively. But not all lease properties have oil that’s readily recoverable.

Pelosi says the president’s action is a “gift of more profits for the oil companies.” Does she prefer that foreign, and often hostile, nations make the profits? Well, they are. She knows that, too.

“The Bush plan is a hoax,” Pelosi charges, ignoring the fact that we know large reserves are located off our shores, in Western oil-shale deposits and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Bush says let’s get it as quickly as possible, drilling responsibly off our shores, in the West’s oil shale formations and on 2,000 acres of the 19 million acres in ANWR. Prudhoe Bay, North America’s largest oil field, has proved we can do so and not hurt the environment. It can be done, and America needs it. Pelosi also knows that.

…relating to his energy challenge. Steven Den Beste, who gave up blogging a few years ago, still posts from time to time and wrote this as a response to a question/challenge about alternative energy.

…I never enjoyed blogging about energy, anyway, because for too many people “alternate energy” is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations — and it’s not that easy.

In order for “alternate energy” to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can’t scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

My rule of thumb is that I’m not interested in any “alternate energy” until someone shows me how to scale it to produce at least 1% of our current energy usage. America right now uses about 3.6 terawatts average, so 1% of that is about 36 gigawatts average.

Show me a plan to produce 36 gigawatts (average, not peak) using solar power, at a price no more than 30% greater than coal generation of comparable capacity, which can be implemented at that scale in 10-15 years. Then I’ll pay attention.

Since solar power installations can only produce power for about 10 hours per day on average, that means that peak power production would need to be in the range of about 85 gigawatts to reach that 1%.

Without that, it’s just religion, like all the people fascinated with wind and with biomass. And even if it did reach 1%, that still leaves the other 99% of our energy production to petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

By all means read the rest of this, plus the comments. Good stuff.

Not real estate. And not oil.

Oil prices tumbled below $130 a barrel for the first time in more than a month Thursday, as crude’s dramatic slide entered a third day accompanied by a sharp sell-off in natural gas.

The declines accelerated amid growing concerns that the weakening economy and creeping inflation are eroding demand for fossil fuels in the U.S. and other large energy-consuming nations.

Growing concerns for whom?

by Michael Ramirez via Powerline.

On the morning of Jan. 28, 1969, a Union Oil drilling site six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., sprang a leak. The ensuing spill stretched for miles, killed thousands of birds, and gave America the image of wildlife and shorelines covered in black crude. That spill is widely considered to have conceived the modern environmental movement. A year later, the first Earth Day was held, followed by passage of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

After the spill, Santa Barbara residents formed an environmental group called GOO! (Get Oil Out!), one of the first community groups to oppose offshore oil drilling. Thirty-nine years later, GOO! is still around. But this April the group did something astonishing. It publicly supported an oil company’s proposal to drill off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Houston-based Plains Exploration and Production Company proposed drilling 22 wells from a platform 4.7 miles from land. It made numerous concessions to the local environmental groups that would curtail drilling in about a decade — and in the end even the adamantly “no-drilling” crowd agreed that the deal was beneficial for everyone.

The Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit environmental law firm, endorsed the plan. Abe Powell, president of GOO!, told the Los Angeles Times it was “good for the community.” Terry Leftgoff, a former GOO! executive director, wrote in the Santa Barbara Independent the deal was “a brilliant proposal that finally gives the public something back: the certain removal of four offshore oil platforms, the decommissioning of a notorious industrial plant, and the reversion of rural land subjugated into oil development back into the public trust as parkland.”

When an environmental group formed for the sole purpose of opposing offshore oil drilling warmly embraces a plan to drill off its own coast, you know something important has changed in our culture: Americans have recognized that offshore oil drilling is largely safe.

Since 1975, drilling in the Exclusive Economic Zone (within 200 miles of the U.S. coast) has had a 99.999% safety record, according to the Energy Information Administration, which reports that “only .001 percent of the oil produced has been spilled.”

Thanks to technological advances, large spills are rare. Most spills are tiny, only a few feet in diameter. Large tanker spills, such as the Exxon Valdez in 1989, are so infrequent they account for a very small fraction of the oil that winds up in the sea.

For some reason, this video won’t embed properly. Click here to watch. 

I plead ignorance about high finance, but I know enough (unlike some in Congress) that our financial system constitutes a sophisticated ”ecosystem” in which various elements interact. For the most part, this produces widespread wealth and prosperity.

As high gasoline prices and an election year fuel the need for scapegoats, some clumsy Congressional clods have been cursing speculators in futures and threatening to do something.

But futures serve a purpose.

Southwest Airlines paid $1.98 per gallon for jet fuel during the first quarter of 2008. The same fuel cost American Airlines $2.73, and United $2.83 per gallon during the same time period.

Southwest Airlines has been hedging fuel costs since 1999 – a practice which has saved the carrier $3.5 billion. At times the hedging has meant the difference between operating at a profit or a loss. In the first quarter of this year, the airline enjoyed hedging gains of $291 million.

Hedging is a strategy that allows a company to protect itself against rising prices for commodities, by locking in pre-set prices.

From trades it has made over the years, Southwest has managed to hedge 70 percent of its anticipated fuel requirements for 2008, at $51 per barrel rather than the current market price of over $140 per barrel.

“We view our program as insurance,” noted Paul Jacobson, Delta Air Lines Inc. treasurer. “Our goal is to minimize the volatility of fuel expenses. To do that, you’ve got to be in the market actively without an opinion as to what energy prices will do.”

Hedging carries risks, however. If fuel prices drop, airlines stand to lose money, and their options will expire.

Last week, news reports noted that “speculators” included such staid entities and teachers’ pension funds and the like. Better drag ‘em before Congress.

Rich Newman at US News shed some light with “6 Myths about Oil Speculators.”

So now we know who’s really responsible for $4 gas. Finger-pointers from Washington, the International Monetary Fund, and even Saudi Arabia no longer seem to buy the idea that the demand for oil around the world is simply growing faster than the supply, driving prices to record highs close to $140 per barrel. There must be a more nefarious reason, it seems. So now entering this drama is a villain everybody can hate: The Evil Speculator.

At recent congressional hearings, politicians and energy experts argued that speculators have artificially added $30 or more to the cost of a barrel of oil, turned oil trading into a global poker game, and doubled the price of gasoline practically overnight.

But who are these party crashers? Where did they come from? How are they doing this? And who can stop them? We’d all like to see a superhero swoop in and smite the speculators, saving Gotham from the peril of $4 gas. The only problem is, speculators aren’t quite the bogeymen that politicians want us to think—and they even play an important role in the oil markets and the global economy. Some major misconceptions:

Speculators are inherently bad for the economy. There’s no doubt that speculators are out to make money, by buying a commodity like oil (or gold, or real estate) when they think the price is likely to rise and they’ll be able to sell for a profit. But they also help sustain the market for buyers and sellers and provide ways for individuals and businesses to offset risks.

Many companies, for instance, want to lock in the price they’re going to pay down the road for petroleum products and other supplies they need to run their businesses. So they make agreements with suppliers on a price they’ll pay next year, or the year after, when they actually take possession of the oil. Buying and selling such “futures contracts” makes these companies speculators by definition, since they’re placing a bet on the future price of oil.

Companies doing this kind of hedging include gasoline refiners, airlines, shipping companies, and others that spend a lot on fuel or petroleum. Often they use investment banks or other intermediaries to arrange the deals. They might be gambling, but this kind of speculation actually helps companies run their businesses more smoothly, and if they guess right on future prices, it may give them a competitive advantage against other companies that don’t plan as prudently.

There‘s a Speculator Star Chamber somewhere. Global markets are so abstruse to ordinary folks that it’s easy to imagine a cabal of evil geniuses pulling the levers from some fortified complex in London or Geneva. But that’s the Hollywood version. “The market is so competitive that that’s nonsense,” says Bob Hodrick, a finance professor at Columbia Business School. “There’s no way for everyone to communicate and get together and say, ‘We’re going to buy and drive the price up.’ ” There are thousands of investors around the world placing bets every day on whether oil prices will go up or down—and they have no way of knowing who their fellow speculators are. All they know is the current price, shown on a computer monitor, plus whatever their own research tells them.

Instapundit:

JERRY POURNELLE ON SHORT-TERM THINKING:

Five years ago we were told that increased refinery and oil pumping capability in the US would do no good because it would take five years for those to affect gas pump prices. Query: if we had greatly increased supply over the past five years, would not oil be at about $75/bbl, still high, but not headed to $200? And if we do nothing to increase supply now, where will oil go? . . . We are in a time of national emergency, but it does not affect the politicians, who continue business as usual.

My response to those who say that increased drilling is pointless because it won’t yield immediate results — like Arnold Schwarzenegger –is why worry about the greenhouse effect, then? Nothing we do will cool the planet immediately. Yet we’re told immediate action there is vital. In fact, we’re told that by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the very same speech.

UPDATE: TigerHawk: “One would have thought that this point was so obvious it would not have to be made at all.”

You can never be too obvious, it seems.

Well, Obama’s against it.

Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America’s addiction to “dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive” oil if he is elected U.S. president — and one of his first targets might well be Canada’s oil sands.

A senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign told reporters it’s an “open question” whether oil produced from northern Alberta’s oilsands fits with the Democratic candidate’s plan to shift the U.S. sharply away from consumption of carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

“If it turns out that those technologies don’t advance . . . and the only way to produce those resources would be at a significant penalty to climate change, then we don’t believe that those resources are going to be part of the long-term, are going to play a growing role in the long-term future,” said Jason Grumet, Mr. Obama’s senior energy adviser.

The remarks amount to a shot across the bow of Alberta’s oil sands industry, which is planning to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to 3.5 million barrels over the next decade.

The industry has come under sustained attack from U.S. environmentalists over the past year because the production of its heavy oil emits an estimated three times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.

Mr. Obama has cast himself as a champion of green energy during his White House campaign, proposing a national low-carbon fuel standard that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 180 million metric tons by 2020. He has also promised to invest $150-billion in developing alternative energy, and to reduce American dependence on foreign oil by 35% by 2030.

“The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless,” Mr. Obama said in an energy policy speech Tuesday in Las Vegas. “We’ve heard promises about it in every State of the Union [speech] for the last three decades. But each and every year, we become more, not less, addicted to oil — a 19th-century fossil fuel that is dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive.”

“…possibilities of renewable energy are limitless” is vapid. Possibilities of anything are limitless, but they won’t fuel your car.

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

John Tierney: 

Offshore drilling has made a photogenic enemy for environmentalists since the famous spill off Santa Barbara in 1969, but its risks have been greatly exaggerated. During the debate over allowing offshore drilling in 1984, the Times editorialized in support of the drilling and offered this response to the opponents:

Why risk populated or ecologically fragile coasts, they say, when oil is available elsewhere? There surely is some risk of damage. But the technology of containing spills and vigor of regulation have come a long way since Santa Barbara. No serious spill has marred the harvesting of four billion barrels from 12,000 drilling rigs in American waters since 1970. Statistically, tankers bearing imported oil now pose a much greater environmental danger.

Since then the risks have shrunk further. A 2003 report from the National Research Council noted that only 1 percent of oil that entered U.S. waters during the 1990s came from extraction operations (like the offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico). Even if you combined that amount with the oil spilled by tankers, it amounted to only 3 percent of the total — and only 1/20th as much oil as entered the water through natural seepage from the ocean floor.

Of course, an oil spill concentrated in one spot can harm the local environment, but banning offshore drilling doesn’t lessen the risk of big oil spills — it simply makes it more likely there’ll be a spill from a foreign tanker. In 1989, when Congress moved to ban drilling off the New Jersey coast, this ban was criticized by Lawrence Schmidt of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection:

I think what’s happening in Congress right now is a knee-jerk reaction to oil spills from tankers. The risks of an accident from a tanker carrying in either foreign crude or refined petroleum are many, many times greater than the risk of an oil spill from an offshore exploration or production platform.

In any case, since this kind of oil is mainly a local problem, what’s wrong with letting the locals decide if they want to take the risk? Even if the federal ban is lifted, states would still have the right to forbid drilling off their coasts, and many have already promised to do just that.

Environmentalists made good arguments for states’ rights when they fought against corporations and the federal government to allow state regulation of the greenhouse emissions from cars. But if states are competent enough to set their own policies on something as complex as global warming, why can’t they decide if drilling rigs should be allowed to operate off their shores?

No matter how stupid Democrats are economically, you can always count on them for a good slogan. Their latest: “You can’t drill your way out of this.”

With record oil prices caused (mostly) by supply shortfalls, the obvious solution is to increase drill for more. Instead the Democrat plan has been:

• sue OPEC for not pumping more oil to sell us, while putting our oil off limits
• penalize oil companies by seizing some of their profits (which belong to millions of citizens with IRAs, mutual funds etc.)
• nationalize oil refineries
• “invest” tax dollars in alternative energy technologies

The latter would make Uncle Sam a venture capitalist. As we write, thousands of venture capitalists, who evaluate business ideas for a living, are risking their own dollars on new technologies — who wouldn’t want a piece of a company that owns the future?

Yet Dems think government can pick energy ventures better than the pro’s. These are the same Democrats who this week had to concede the Senate couldn’t run a lunch room profitably and outsourced the job to the private sector.

And the very Democrats who condemn Bush for not planning for every contingency in the war on terror cannot grasp the idea planning for tomorrow. Thus drilling in ANWR is dismissed as having no effect on today’s “crisis.” But if Bill Clinton had not vetoed ANWR drilling, we’d be pumping it today.

As food prices rise and shortages loom, one would think that planting more crops would be the obvious step, and it is. But you can’t eat today what you plant today. So by Democrat logic, there’s really no point in increasing the food supply — you can’t plant your way out it.

Via Maggie’s Farm, there’s this cooked up by the Republicans.

It’s bitter laugh time when Obama bitches that Bush has “no energy policy” as Patrick Casey makes clear:

The Democrats have a standardized talking point against any domestic drilling (in  ANWR, the Midwest oil shales and off-shore), settling on the comeback: “It won’t help us today.” Energy-savvy Republicans too often respond “If Clinton hadn’t vetoed ANWR, that oil field would have been producing three years ago.” While technically correct, the retort doesn’t hit the Democrats where they are weakest.
Battle of the Narratives
Blame for the rise of gasoline prices (and everything else dependent on petroleum) is a political commodity right now, with each side seeking to hold the other culpable. The Democrats are avoiding their traditional environmental arguments for good reason.
If the voters see environmentalists, tree-huggers, and their Democratic political minions as causing $4 or $5 dollar a gallon gasoline, along with the rise in consumer prices across the board because of the increase of the cost of oil used as an ingredient in many products, they will blame the Democrats.
And frustration with environmentalism is starting to show up in the polls, which are indicating an increasing call for domestic drilling from the American public. 
With most of the TV interview time on the major networks and cable news stations limited to a minute or so, there is a very short window in which a politician can get out an effective message. Even worse is the decreasing sound bite time used in non-interview style news reports. According to a recent study, that’s down to 7.7 seconds. So it’s vital for the GOP to develop a quick response to the Democrats’ argument that will focus attention on the positives of the GOP argument.

What is that effective message? Here’s a suggestion. It should be used every time a Democrat marches out their new favorite line:
Every solution currently under consideration by the Democrats and Republicans is a future solution. Oil drilling and processing is a present-day technology that offers the quickest solution to our energy needs. As the other technologies are gradually proven and perfected and go on-line, we can then reduce our dependence on oil.
A sympathetic news media will often grant time for the Democrats’ counter argument, which is likely to be: this “solution” won’t solve the problem of speculative  investors forcing up the price of oil.
The Republicans’ retort to that excuse should be along the following lines:
Right now, with the Democrats in charge, global investors realize that Congress will never allow the United States to develop its own energy reserves. With a Democratic President it would be even worse.  If the Democrats stop their obstruction of drilling, that would immediately put downward pressure on such speculation in the oil futures markets.
Or the Democrats might respond by suggesting that we regulate the commodities market, especially the oil commodities market NYMEX. The GOP response should be:
If the Democrats go after NYMEX, then oil speculators will move the futures markets overseas to a more friendly economic host, such as Dubai. We must address the fundamentals of supply and demand, instead of blocking every chance we get to create jobs and wealth in America through domestic production..

IBD: 

While some companies like British Petroleum run endless ads touting their capitulation to the global warming religion by saying they are “beyond” petroleum, Exxon Mobil has been refreshingly unapologetic about developing the resources beneath our feet and making money doing it.

Speaking to reporters after the annual meeting of Exxon stockholders Wednesday, CEO Rex Tillerson shoved political correctness aside and insisted the science on climate change is not settled and “that to not have a debate on it is irresponsible” and that to “suggest we know everything about these issues is irresponsible.”

Also irresponsible is to ignore the growing energy requirements of the U.S. and world economy, hoping they will be met solely by sources such as biofuels which actually harm the environment by leading to cutting down forests and disturbing the soil to plant crops destined for our gas tanks, releasing huge amounts of CO2 in the process.

Tillerson says that “everyone agrees that notwithstanding the growth in all other options for supplying energy, renewables, nuclear, biomass alternatives, you are still going to require substantial fossil fuels to meet energy needs, and two-thirds is going to come from oil and natural gas.”

He spoke of Exxon spending $8 billion of its profits on the Kearl oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. This project alone is aimed at recovering between 4.5 and 6.5 billion barrels of oil.

Finding such oil takes money and expensive technology. That money comes from profits.