Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Gas is below $3.00 per gallon. This is proof that Democrat policies are good for America.
Plainly, raising the minimum wage does not cause prices to go up: just the opposite, they went down. Restricting oil permits on federal lands did not cause a shortage of domestic oil: we’re awash with it so prices are falling. And there’s no need to worry about stability in the Middle East when America now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. The natural conclusion is we should elect more Democrats to continue their good work.
Or . . . gas prices are falling because demand is falling as the economy worldwide is collapsing. Mitt Romney famously pointed out that gas was $1.81 when Barack Obama took office, to which Liberals everywhere insisted that low gas prices were due to impending economic collapse. If the same logic applied now as applied then, we should be worried. Very worried.
This time it’ll be different, of course. This time, it’ll be Bush’s fault.
Joe doakes
Como park
To be fair, I think the administration is going to have to pivot from blaming Bush to blaming the next president.
Eventually, anyway.
“If the same logic applied now as applied then, we should be worried. Very worried.”
Heh!
“If the same logic applied now as applied then, we should be worried. Very worried.”
“Liberals” and logic are like oil and water — they never mix, and even when blended don’t work well.
Odummer hasn’t been able to jack up gas prices as much as he’d like with his policies because the market has been trying to make a buck out of the Bakken and other private fracking fields. If we still had a Congress that “wasn’t deadlocked” we’d have all sorts of “progressive” legislation to prevent fracking to “protect the environment” by making life more miserable for anyone who wasn’t a millionaire.
I still like PJ O’Rourke’s comment on oil and cars: “We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?”
Or, the devil’s advocate might suggest that the demand for infernal oil and it’s selfish uses has declined as more and more people have seen the light.
As Dear Leader suggested to the man who said he couldn’t afford the high price of gasoline, many must have bought electric and hybrid cars. Not to mention green infrastructure has made mass transit more available, and many former drivers are now using it, just like the Ventura Memorial Train Set.
This green altruism surely must be responsible for the current oil glut, not a lack of economic need for it. After all, haven’t you heard Dear Leader’s pronouncement of His countries good economic health?
Two sets of data I’d love to have:
-Full pollution accounting for a hybrid vs a gasoline automobile, including disposal at end of economic life.
-An accounting of mandatory recycling that includes all the costs of recycling, including the cost of separate bins for each home, consumer time spent sorting trash, and the cost of transporting recyclables.
Do you believe it’s unlikely that recycling saves raw materials, energy and reduces pollution?
Save raw materials? No. Matter is not destroyed when it’s buried in a landfill. It’ll be there years from now when we want to exhume it to extract the useful parts.
Energy? No. 300 million people cutting cardboard boxes into acceptable sized squares is a waste of human energy.
Pollution? Bad things to go Hazardous Waste Disposal, everything else goes to a landfill in Iowa. Recycling does not affect pollution.
Emery, economically speaking the only things worth recycling from the household waste stream are steel and aluminium. All other materials are actually a net loss in economic terms as far as recycling goes, and a net drain in energy, increase CO2 production, etc.
What nerdbert said. Recycling is mostly a net loss. It doesn’t even pay to get the silver out of old electronics.
Emery, what nerdbert said. With the exception of aluminium, most recycling actually damages the environment. My favorite, as a bicyclist, is that most of the glass they “recycle” actually becomes road base. The trouble is that actual gravel does not tend to fracture along crystalline lines in the way glass does, and hence unless it is securely in the matrix of asphalt and such, it can and will rip up bike tires.
Thanks, environmentalists, for yet another reason to drive a car.
Powhatan, the data I’ve seen indicate that an ordinary electric or hybrid vehicle requires about twice the carbon emissions to build, and the ordinary procedure for dealing with spent batteries is to simply put it in a barrel as hazardous waste. It’s not (yet) cost-efficient to recycle them, which is saying something, as it’s no picnic mining and refining lithium, either.
So if we assume that we have an extra 15,000 lbs of C02 emissions with one (probably 2-3x that for a Tesla with its bigger batteries), the overall carbon emissions, overwhelmingly from coal, are about 0.6-0.7 lbs/mile, about on a par with a midsize family sedan.
In other words, electric and hybrid cars are an ecological wash at best, a (Tesla) disaster at worst.