Re: Diesel prices

On Mar 15, 10:43 am, heav <p...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The U.S. is a lot bigger, geographically, than Ireland too.  It's hard
to live in the rural parts of the U.S., especially in the larger
western states, without driving long distances regularly.

Trader4, what is the explanation, other than greed, that is preventing
capital from investing heavily in solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and
mass transit?  Why this slavish addiction to fossil fuels?  That is
not a rhetorical question.   I suspect you have some inside view
insight into those issues.

The basic answer is because most of those alternative energy sources
are still more expensive than oil, coal, and natural gas. Here in
NJ, you can get a modest size solar system for your house for $50K.
The state may chip in $30k of that from a fund generated through a tax
they levy on everyone's electric bill. That means for $20K you have a
system that should pay for the homeowner's cost in about 8 years. But
consider just taking out a mortgage at 7% to pay for that $20K, and
that cost would run $1400 a year, which already makes it look a lot
different. And if you had to borrow the money and pay the full
$50K, as a commercial venture would, you'd go broke.

Wind can be used successfully in SOME locations, but certainly not
everywhere. And when you try to use it, guess who shows up to block
it? Same environmental extremists that are against everything.
That has happened here where there was a proposal to start using them
off the coast of NJ. It's still moving ahead, but at a snails pace
because of environmental opposition, bitching about the possible
effect on fish, birds, the shore view... Same thing happened off
Cape Cod. There was also a proposal to build some off Long Island,
but faced with opposition and a mediocre prospect of profitability,
the company called it quits. Personally, I'd rather have an oil rig
15 miles+ offshore, where you'll never see it rather than a bunch of
windmills within sight of the shore.

Ethanol is starting to meet a small % of the demand, but only recently
with subsidies and $100 barrel oil does it start to make sense. And
I predict before long, you're gonna here bitching about that too,
because as more land is devoted to that, along with it comes more run
off, more water usage, etc. Plus, it's driven up grain prices
substantially, so that you're now paying more for cereal, pasta, beef,
eggs, etc.

Mass transit, in general, has always been a loser and heavily
subsidized in most cases. Plus it doesn't fit current urban
lifestyle. Here in NJ, it's OK for commuting to NYC. But that's
only a small percent of the traffic. The rest is going to pick up
kids at school, the supermarket, the mall, then a friends house,
etc. The train/bus doesn't go there.

IMO, the one thing that is readily available and could be brought
online relatively quickly is nuclear. But because of irrational fear,
that gets blocked too. Which exposes another environmental extremist
hypocrisy. We're supposed to believe that life on the planet is in
jeopardy within a few decades from global warming, yet the
environmentalists will have no part in using more nuclear. Nuclear
isn't perfect, but if France can get 70% of their electric from it,
and Japan 40%, it would seem a reasonable alternative to allegedly
certain irreparable climate change and death.


We also could be opening up areas like CA and the east coast to
offshore drilling, drilling in ANWR, etc. Every time there has been a
price spike in energy in the last 20 years, that's been blocked by
people saying, it's not worth it because it will take 5 years to get
any oil. If we'd started even in 2003, we'd have that oil by now.
And perhaps even find an elephant size field up there, because no one
knows how much oil there really is. Environmentalists won't even
allow test drilling to find out for sure.

So, you have rising demand for oil from places like India, where I
believe it's gone up 9% a year, meeting worldwide output that is
somewhere near peaking. And life goes on....



It seems that if the trillions spent to try and dominate Iraqi oil and
the pipeline corridor through the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and
Afghanistan had been spent on alternative fuels, alternative vehicles
and mass transit we could have made good progress toward moving beyond
the oil addiction.  No?  Why are markets failing to see this?

Been there, done that. In the 70's, the govt did exactly that.
They spent billions on alternative energy. One big component was
supposed to be shale oil. You know how much energy we got from all
those programs? Not one drop. Haven't you seen enough of the
incompetence of govt to do most things right? If they can't run a
war, which after all should be one of their core competencies, what
makes you think they know anything about energy?

But they are doing some of what you suggest anyway. They have
subsidized ethanol. That was probably an obvious choice because it
pleases the farmers.

The most important thing to drive a alternative solutions is already
happening and that's rising prices. If you look around the world, I'm
not sure anywhere else is doing much better with economically viable
alternative sources on a large scale. Traveling in Europe the biggest
difference I see is that gas costs twice or more what it does here and
they drive much smaller cars. The trend to smaller cars will happen
here over time with the rising energy prices.



The greenhouse gas and climate change issues must also be considered.
Humanity cannot continue to expand the burning of fossil fuel without
serious adverse consequences like reduction of food production and the
flooding of coastal cities.

I'm not sold on the fact that man-made CO2 is the cause of global
warming or that it's going to doom us all. Here's a key issue I'd
like to see answered. If you look at the neat graphs of CO2 cycles
and global temperatures, there have been I think 4 cycles over the
last 700,000 years. This is the graph Al Gore uses, among others,
and it's widely available. In every one of those cycles, temperature
begins to rise a few hundred to about 1500 years BEFORE CO2. Now, to
any thinking person, this would seem to be a big issue, no? If CO2
causes the rise, then why doesn't it work the other way around, with
CO2 rising first?

There is a professor of ocean science at MIT who has an explanation.
And that is that the world's oceans are the vast reservoirs of CO2 on
the planet. The earth starts to warm from some other reason, most
likely change in the suns output. Over time, this causes CO2 to be
released from the oceans, just like CO2 from a warming bottle of
soda. The reason it takes hundreds of years for it to happen is
because the oceans are so big that it takes time for the temp to
change much.

Now, am I sure he's 100% right? No. But I've yet to see any of the
global warming proponents offer their explanation to account for the
reverse graphs. I heard one imbecile from a major university asked
the question and his answer was "Well, it only shows that CO2 isn't
responsible for the first few hundred years of temp rise." Also,
supposedly, the temp on Mars is currently rising. Do they have humans
emitting CO2? In other words, there are lots of legitimate questions,
but anyone daring to ask them runs the risk of being run out of town.
Or worse, having their funding cut off.

I think there is a very good chance that if you live long enough, you
may get to see the temp rise reverse on it's own. There have been
many cycles before, long, short, medium. Do a google on global
cooling and you'll find articles from the 70's when alleged climate
experts were making many of the same alarmist statements about the
mini ice age that was upon us. At the time, they said many of the
same things you here today, ie how now with computers they can model
the climate, etc.

No one can accurately predict the weather more than a few days ahead.
These models have equations where someone has to pick the coefficients
to put in front of variable X, Y, and Z. It's a lot like economics.
PHD's like to right partial differential equations that describe how
part of the economy works. The only problem is, no one knows whether
the coefficient in front of variable X should be .06 or .08, etc. In
the current environment, I think the guys fooling around with climate
models have every incentive to come up with models that show global
warming. If they don't they get run out of town.




Incidentally, I am a business owner and make my living entirely as a
capitalist.

Good for you, that's what drives this economy.
.

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