More than any other issue, Obama has hyped this by making a bunch of promises that simply won't work.
Unfortunately, at the current rate, by the time we realize what a terribly vulnerable position he has placed us in, it will be many years too late to do anything about it.
What's particularly tragic is that this is a solvable problem.
If Brasil could solve it, so can we.
But we're not going to find solutions down the path where Obama is leading us.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123654827391164761.html

Great article........ interesting read............

That windmill won't be 17,500 when we ramp up production. That's part of the equation too.

(03-25-2009 05:02 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  That windmill won't be 17,500 when we ramp up production. That's part of the equation too.

Mach,

You're a good guy but you're drinking the kool-aid. There are things that will work. If we abandon our pursuit of things that won't work (or that won't make enough difference to matter if they do work), and go after the things that will work, we can still get out of this. But we're losing time and moving in the wrong direction at this point.

(03-25-2009 05:02 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  That windmill won't be 17,500 when we ramp up production. That's part of the equation too.

So how much will the price drop? Probably not to $53.48. Maybe more like $10,000. Then it's only a litttle over 5000 gallons of gasoline at current prices to break even.

Let's look at it another way. If the wind blows every night, and if we can charge up our electric car that we paid $35,000 for, how much gasoline do we save? If we drive 100 miles per charge, instead of getting 20 MPG, we've saved 5 gallons of gasoline. That's a little over 1/10 of a barrel of oil per day; okay, consider that the gasoline only uses somewhere between 18 and 25 gallons out of the barrel, then it's 1/4 to 1/5 of a barrel per day. We import 13 million barrels of oil a day. We need 50-65 million of these windmills to eliminate that. More, after we factor in that no drilling means domestic production will decline significantly.

The windmill is a great idea, don't get me wrong. It's just that it's not a great idea that's going to solve our problem; it's a great idea that will make a miniscule contribution to solving the problem, but we will need a LOT of help from something else to go along with it.

I honestly don't think that the people pushing all these alternatives have ever taken the time to look at the numbers. If they did, they would realize that we're not going to solve the problem with things like this.

Oil is the most economical resource for the huge amount of supply that is needed, IF the Govt. would just butt out(i.e. allow drilling, etc). Plus the Infrastructure is in place for it...for cars that is.

We should also have tons more Nuke power plants and everything else that is Economically feasible and doesn't require Govt. intervention to make it viable.

Solar, wind, nuke etc is better for homes than cars. RUn trucks/trains on nat gas... run cars on as little gas as possible (and ethanol)

(03-25-2009 11:52 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Although I get bashed for being a right wing extremist on here, I'm actually in favor of some form of cap and trade. Not sure what we are looking at right now makes sense, but for a lot of reasons we need to get away from our dependence on foreign oil. We simply cannot survive if we don't.

you left-wing knee jerk commie pinko!!