Vote Republican! It's like doubling your car mileage!

That should be a 2012 campaign slogan for the GOP. (Update Below)

I went down  to the Gulf coast and back yesterday for a memorial Mass and burial of my Aunt who was also my Godmother. That meant a lot of time on the road to think of many things related to the trip and life in general.

It also took two refills of the gas tank. On the second tank, it hit me that this trip would have been less than half the cost (~$50 instead of over $100) if President Obama's energy policies had never existed or if they are reversed. I don't care what his motives are, but the end result was the same.

From a consumer $ point of view, it's the same today as if my car was only getting 11-12 mpg in 2007.

From ThePeoplesCube

My line of thought was undoubtedly fed by conversations with relatives after the burial ceremony, three of whom have jobs with the oil and gas industry and another looking to get into the business.

P.S. In case someone is so inclined: Spare us the 'Peak Oil' BS.
Even so-called 'Ecologists' unreasonably fear the long term availability of oil.  Other energy sources will make sense when oil REALLY (vs. artificially) gets scarce. What scares 'Ecos' (smarter ones anyway) even more is the possibility that Western assumptions underlying oil production may not be correct.  Yet another science that is unsettled.

Update 5 May 12 for a commenter.

An Investor's Business Daily article briefly summing up the most cogent points here.

A nice graphic illustrating much of same from the Senate GOP:

If there is an unsupported assertion in these sources, prove it.

No 'Fox News' involved. I just ordered Jonah Goldberg's new book The Tyranny of Cliches . While  attempting to disparage information on the presumption that it comes from a certain source is Circumstantial Ad Hominem , the continued use of the logical fallacy should be considered rising to the 'Cliche' level. --I wonder if the 'Fox News' cliche made it into Goldberg's book?

Footnote:  I'm not against careful use of cliches. Truth told too often can become cliche as well as falsehoods. They serve as a convenient shorthand in discussions as long as those discussions do not involve an argument. But one discovers over time that while a 'true' cliche can be adequately supported by additional explanation and detail, a falsehood hiding in a cliche will be destroyed by same.  

US Fish and Wildlife Needs a Good 'Purge'

H/T Classical Values
I want to make activist U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologists (Man!-I hate soft sciences) as 'Endangered' as the imaginary species they try to 'proclaim' into existence. I mean that. They should be too afraid of recrimination to ever consider using this kind of scientific fraud.

Hey A**hats! - the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard is a subspecies, not a species. There's less genetic difference between the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard and it's nearby cousins in New Mexico than there is between humans of different races. Are you saying humankind is made up of different species?

BTW: The F&WS has a long history of employees 'making' the data fit their religious beliefs...and the problem is clearly institutional.

Also, what is the biggest threat to the Lizard anyway? One Suspect.

Awwww. Prius Drivers Lose Their Perk

(H/T Jalopnik)

The 'State' giveth. And when your behaviors have been sufficiently altered, the 'State' taketh away.

Of course, my feelings concerning 'hybrids', especially the Prius, and the insentient emoters that tend to buy them, have been expressed before.

At least the Prius is 'better' than the last Honda Insight, although what Jeremy Clarkson wrote about the Insight applies pretty much to all 'hybrids' (just change some locations):

But I cannot see how making a car with two motors costs the same in terms of resources as making a car with one.
The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

To be honest, I have seen one 'hybrid' I really liked. I was on a business trip to California earlier this year and saw this one:

Sweeeet...

More "Verde" Hybrid Nonsense

Hat tip: WUWT

THE Times (Not one of the American ones) has an excellent article dissecting and dissing Honda's new Insight car model (a hybrid). The author, Mr Clarkson, also looks a little closer into the 'green' aspects of hybrids and electric cars. As cited by a commenter at WUWT, Mr Clarkson I believe gets particularly close the what the hub-bub about these so-called 'green' cars is really all about:

The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And when the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

(Emphasis mine).

I don't know if there was a 'beard' in this car or not, but the 'doing the world a favor' part definitely applied.

Post script: just drove the new (used) ride cross country: 27+ MPG @ 75-80 MPH. No hybrid under the hood, just a handbuilt AMG 3.2L supercharged engine driving a 5 speed autostick-- made the trip sooo much more fun. About 1500 miles and I only had two brain-dead 'smug' hybrid polluters pass me at those speeds. Yeah I burn premium, but I know those POSs weren't getting as good MPG highway as I was getting either.

More ‘Verde’ Than You…

…you self-aggrandizing, brain-dead, punk-a** pinhead.

So…. A few weeks ago, I was driving back from a visit to my friends and their new beach house in my 2007 Ford Focus, doing ‘about’ the speed limit (translation 3-5 over) and I get this guy (In the unisex Chicago sense of the word) going about 5-10 mph faster than me coming up from behind. We’re on the twisty Hwy 126 between Santa Clarita and Port Hueneme (in the People's Republik of CA).

The traffic on the road clears up a bit as we near Santa Clarita and ‘Eco-boy/girl’ whips around on the left and passes me, and asks me (in writing!) the question:

Hmmmm. Now, I lived in an earth-bermed solar home in Northern Utah for ten years. I LOVED the fact that my energy bills in the dead of winter were only equal to about 5% of ANY of my neighbor’s energy bills- BUT!-Not even once, EVER!, did I get an urge strike out on a sacred campaign or did it occur to me to question how anyone else lived. I reasoned (and still do) that everyone gets to make their own choices for their own reasons.

Now this pile of piety believes he/she has a mission to ask everyone he/she passes on the road if they are 'Verde'?

Hmmm. Am I “Verde”? Well… Let’s do a side-by-side comparison shall we?

Vehicle Operation
First, according to one road test, your slime-green Prius only gets a very few more miles to the gallon than my Focus does in the real world at real highway speeds: and that is ONLY if you are driving rationally in the first place. This test bothered the acolytes of the hybrid religion enough to cause them to attempt to rationalize away the disparity between the Prius’ computer calculations and the measured gallons needed to refill the Prius’ tank by claiming that the Prius’ tank construction MIGHT or COULD have caused refill volumes to vary and skew the test. This rationalization gets cherry-picked by treehugger.com who conveniently fails to note that the critique itself is pretty well debunked soon after in the same thread. There’s some other real and imagined problems with the ‘test’, some relevant some not, but the bottom line is that unless you drive the Prius like a complete energy-managing jerk on the highway, you are NOT going to get all that much better mileage than someone else who was driving a small and economical internal combustion vehicle if THEY were also driving like a complete energy-swapping jerk. (My heart warms knowing there are boards and websites out there on HOW to drive like an idiot in the pursuit of the magical maximum Prius MPG. )

Now, having observed your driving style Zippy, I submit that I’m getting as good as or better mileage than you are. Notice I didn’t even bring up the reality of battery replacement costs that are coming down the road.

(Side Note: Please spread this among the faithful: CO2 is NOT a pollutant, and the EPA can’t make it a pollutant any more than a law can successfully make Pi =3.)

Advantage: Focus (or Maybe at worst a Tie)

But what about the other relative eco-life-cycle costs?

Vehicle Manufacturing
“Dust to Dust”, a 'study' claiming less energy expended per mile driven for a Hummer vs. a Prius over the operational lives of each caused quite a ‘dust-up’ itself among the Enviros, spawning self-righteous denunciations from the true believers (see here and here). Admittedly, there was much to criticize Dust to Dust about. But while I do not accept the critics’ views of the Dust to Dust piece entirely I find their criticisms generally have some merit, but they miss (for their own reasons I'm sure) the true problem with Dust to Dust: It was a grandstanding comparison between too dissimilar vehicles.

Dust to Dust got the press’ attention, so you could call it a complete success by one measure. But now we have to listen to the legions of Prius fans thumping their chests over what should be a ‘no duh’ point: Prius has a smaller carbon footprint than a Hummer. Worst of all, the points concerning the environmental damage that is a product of Prius’ battery production, AND the fact that making it is much less earth-friendly than building something like my Focus, a comparable car, is simply lost in the noise.

Advantage: Focus

Vehicle Disposal
Well we’ve covered manufacturing and use: That leaves disposition of the remains at the end-of-life. Since the only thing really different between the Prius (and other similar hybrids of course) is the electrical side of the propulsion package in the Prius, and both cars have an internal combustion propulsion system as well, the waste stream is therefore more complex with more components for the Prius. Fortunately, automobiles contain perhaps the highest percentage of recyclable components of any consumer product, so the extra burden of recycling the battery/charging elements can’t be too much higher than a conventional automobile of similar size, although relative toxin content has to weigh more heavily towards the hybrids. Toyota even has a recycling program that only Heaven knows if it will survive the future wave of obsolete and no-longer-trendy Prius retirements that will come someday. I’ll cut the Prius some slack.

Advantage (slight): Focus

Therefore, in case you missed my earlier answer to your question:

Since you asked, I am MORE ‘Verde’ than you, you self-aggrandizing, brain-dead, punk-a** pinhead.

Honestly, the world is full of these types. How do the rest of us survive?

Epilogue:
I almost forgot: After rushing up on me in their poor-handling, high body-rolling POS hybrid econobox, and whipping (as much as a Prius can 'whip' anyway- more like 'lurching')around me as soon as it cleared enough, Zippy here came back into my lane, hit the brakes and turned right shortly after I snapped the pic. I had to swerve to get around him.

Updated 21 Mar 09 11pm Central: corrected and clarified some minor points.

President Obama Burns Rome, Press Fiddles

I'm getting ready for work while back out here on a temp job in SoCal. Just now KTLA morning news ran a piece (live?) where President Obama hosted yet another segment of his apparently never-ending press conference. In just a few minutes, the President blew off investors in the stock market, redefined America from someplace with opportunity for all into someplace where "all things are possible" for all people, and wrapped everything up in a huge pile of misdirection and obfuscation. Immediately afterwards, bubblehead Michaela Pereira fairly cackled over the President's 'speech'.

When I get back from work tonight, I'll link to today's resultant stock market dive and to elsewhere in the blogosphere where today's manifestation of President Obama's malevolence towards American Civilization will be documented in more detail.

Update @1933hrs (Pacific):
As predicted:

“Wall Street sinks as Obama warns of oversight”.

Yeah that's it, 'oversight'. Not the subversion of free markets and socialist programs being pushed at the moment.

I really think the announcement I saw playing this AM was from yesterday.
As to proof of the impact, from the NASDAQ site we get this pic:

Looks like the downturn started about the time the morning and midday news on the right and left coasts started airing him opening his yap.
If they ran his bloviating every day for a week, I wonder what the Dow would look like? ~Shudder~

America Can't Drive 55!

Or: "One More Reason Why I Am a Conservative First, Republican (Leaning Independent) Second" (H/T Instapundit)

I've been waiting (like a lot of folks, I know) for the first bonehead in Congress to raise the spectre of the double-nickle speed limit. Little did I expect it would come from a Republican. But then I'm a wide-open spaces Westerner, and often forget there is the Feeble-Minded East Coast Establishment GOP out there hanging on and dragging the rest of the party down? Hey Senator Warner! What Would Reagan Do?

Golly, I hate small-minded people whose first instinct is to 'contract', 'withdrawal', 'scale back', 'settle for less', etc. I hate them when they are in positions of power even more.

Prof. Reynolds also linked to an article he wrote at TCS back in 2005.

I've been busy: Part 2

Road Trip!
(Click on one for a larger image)

So. When the heck did they put the Bird Cuisinarts in East of Snyder?
There was a tornado reported in this Thunderhead over Roswell, NM.
Saw well over a hundred head of deer in groups of 5 to 20 on the road up to Cloudcroft. At least I didn't come close to hitting an elk this time.....
OK, 'Holloman' or keep heading West?
Head West! Passing a train at the Continental Divide.

Congress Causing High Gas Prices: Asks Oil Companies Why

I actually prepared this a while back for a friend at work who begrudges the oil companies their profit. Every time the quarterly earnings come out we get treated to the despair over the oil company profits by our more Socialist leadership 'leaders'. Did you ever wonder why 'oil profits' are never presented in any context, but always in raw numbers without any frame of reference? I made the chart below just for those out there who can't grasp just how big 'big oil' is. This is a graphic view of the 2006 profitability of the 2007 Fortune 1000 companies.

That's right: Exxon Mobile is only a 'mid-performing company, making about 11 cents profit off every dollar it takes in. It's just a freaking HUGE mid-performing company.

Now all we have to do is get Congress to stop pandering to the Enviros and the rest of the far left, and we can lower prices at the pump AND improve the bottom line for Exxon etal.

"Eco Moms" - Riiight

H/T Instapundit

Eco Moms? Who hoo! I think I'm going to be revisiting these concerned and caring people in the future. Of course I wouldn't have to if they weren't budding 'activists'. I'm thinking of setting up a counter organization. Hmmm, it will need a catchy name. I'll work on it.

Up front let me state I'm definitely NOT anti-conservation or anti-'ecology' Who IS? (Outside of Red China of course). Hell, for a decade I lived in a solar home in Northern Utah that was also partially earth-sheltered, and probably saved more energy than any ten of these people will in their lifetimes-and all without giving up any trappings of modern civilization. From the article, I'm guessing some might be spending more on 'therapy' than most of us will ever lay out for energy.

I'm more of a "better living through progress" kind of guy, and I get the feeling that these Eco Moms, like so many of the "dripping concerned", yearn for a simpler time. One that really never was.

Windmill Advocates Tilting at Critics

AKA Bird Cuisinarts Part II (Part 1 Here)

Hat Tip: Instapundit

The numbers below, attributed to the National Research Council have been presented as representing the breakdown of major ‘anthropogenic causes’ of bird deaths, are now flying (no pun intended) around the World Wide Web:

Domestic cats: Hundreds of millions a year
Striking high-tension lines: 130 million - 1 billion a year
Striking buildings: 97 million to 976 million a year
Cars: 80 million a year
Toxic chemicals: 72 million
Striking communications towers: 4 to 50 million a year
Wind turbines: 20,000 to 37,000

How unfortunate.

Unfortunate, because at first look these numbers could be nothing more than, in a word, “crap”. It is particularly unfortunate because to realize they are crap, all one has to do is to simply cogitate for a moment on the numbers as they are presented:

Doesn’t the first number (‘Domestic Cats’) appear particularly vague to the reader? It looks very much like “somebody’s” obvious WAG (Wild A** Guess). Think about it. The expression used represents any number between 200,000,000 and 999,999,999 dead birds. Isn’t that a little ‘broad’ of a number to have come from any meaningful and conclusive research?

About the second, third, and sixth (Striking High-Tension Lines, Buildings, and Communications Towers) numbers : see anything perplexing about the ranges offered? Exactly what should one conclude about any estimate that spans an entire order of magnitude? Think about it - there is enough uncertainty in the numbers provided to consider the very high probability that whoever gathered this ‘information’ didn’t have enough data to actually determine the real numbers. Heck, they couldn’t even determine the scale of the deaths due to these causes.

The fourth ‘cause’ listed is suspect given the weapon (Cars) and the geographical size of the ‘crime scene’ (Roads). Accepting the 80 Million number as a convenient ‘round-off’, how was the data collected and estimate formed? There’s an awfully lot of cars to follow, with thousands and thousands of miles of roads cutting through untold numbers of different ecosystems and bird populations to factor into any estimate. Full Disclosure: I admit I may have been a little more skeptical than some concerning this number, due to my exposure to my Grandfather’s stirring tales of observing and auditing game bird population survey lunacies in Jackson County, Oregon.

Toxic Chemicals. Hmmph.
Nice number. 72 million. Not 70, not 75. Seventy Two.

Fairly specific for a causality :

1. that doesn’t always kill at the point of exposure,
2. with a victim that for what must be an overwhelmingly large, yet unquantifiable percentage of the time probably isn’t even found or subject to a post mortem,
3. with a verifiable sample population that has the cause of death assessed by someone who might be in their line of work due to their inspiration by Rachael Carlson. (my personal skepticism coming out here)

There's not enough evidence to throw out this number without further review by a long-shot I know, but it is definitely a number I would want to investigate before I accepted it much less repeated.

Wind Turbines. A realistic ‘appearing’ range anyway, but from my anecdotal experience it seems..ahem… low. Also given the ‘study’ purpose, might the research have just a 'slight' windmill bias?

Don’t Take My Word For It -- Take the Source's Word For It.
Well I know these numbers are crap, and normally I wouldn’t even bother to investigate how the crap was created in the first place. I would just take the position that if someone else thought I was wrong, then they could go try and prove it. But this information was easy enough get: it comes from the ‘study’ that provided it in the first place. From Pages 50 and 51:


The authors immediately after this admission attempt to make a case that the numbers are still meaningful, but their logic is severely undercut by their own later descriptions of what they see as needed for future research and by what is in their summary at the end. Also, if anyone bothers to read this report/study they should note the authors devote a lot of attention to the far less cute but no less threatened bats. For some reason, there is not just the same outcry over that equally important part of the ecosystem.

So, why don’t we just build us some nice clean nuclear power plants, instead of clogging up our landscapes and seascapes with these ugly windmills, hmmmm?

On a personal note:
1. I’m still waiting for somebody to do an in-depth analysis of the Wind Energy industry’s waste stream.
2. It chaps my cheeks to be on the same side as Teddy Kennedy on any subject, even if he’s on the right side for the wrong reasons.

A Message From Flyover Country

Corn Farmer Marketing

Got this (click on pic for larger view) in the mail today. While I somewhat agree with the sentiment, I am not a very big fan of Ethanol: I need more therms per gallon.

What this picture does is remind me of what I think about every time I fly crosscountry: that if you want to see what raw economic power looks like, spend some time looking out the window on your next flight from New York to LA. Notice how until you hit the foothills of the Rockies, you can see land in cultivation as far as the eye can see, out of both sides of the airplane. Notice the small towns, and the massive network of paved roads, railroads, and in some places waterways that link these farms to small towns and then to bigger ones, and then those to even bigger cities. You are looking at an economic engine that spans a continent and among other things, feeds the world.

NO BIG OIL COLLUSION

Sorry (Not Really)
The speed at which the investigators looked into the possibility of major oil companies colluding to manipulate oil and gas prices, and found NONE, will shortly have someone, somewhere, screaming COVERUP! and WHITEWASH! Oh, there were isolated instances at the retail and distribution levels post-Katrina, but no major oil company involvement.

I knew it wouldn’t take long for the ‘oil gouging’ investigation to wrap up. It was impossible for it to take much time. I mean, we only keep more excruciating public details on all aspects of the oil business than just about any other commodity, including:oil production,imports(PDF),petroleum product exports (.xls),transportation, and refinery operations.

Remarkably, even with much ambiguity over the mere definition of ‘price gouging', investigators found NO “big oil” collusion.

Of course that won’t keep the innumerate, paranoid, politically ambitious or possibly somebody suffering from any combination of these faults from claiming the investigation was a whitewash or coverup.

Update in midstream...

….report shows ``that federal investigators don't have the tools they need to protect the American people from gas price gouging,'' Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said today in a statement.

``The FTC ignored the 800 pound gorilla in the room, namely that the oil companies engage in price leadership - setting prices higher than what real competition would merit,'' Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement.

Look for a gripping performance by Reid’s or Schumer’s proxies (right column) when the FTC chairwoman appears before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee tomorrow.

Should be a hoot.

Oh, one more thing. Chuck Schumer's wrong about that gorilla; the gorilla is the fact that federal and state governments make much more off every gallon of gas than anybody in the actual production/supply chain. Especially in Schumer's state, where the state taxes on the total value of the sale instead of by the gallon. Now that's a definition of gouging I can live with!

Bird Cuisinarts

Instapundit has a good post up on the NIMBY - Wind Farm issue, and one of his readers (a Ms. Jackson) sent in a nice shot of the Tehachapi wind farm as seen from Mojave Airport.

I left that area (the Antelope Valley) in 2003 after living there for a decade. I watched the number and size of windmills grow while flying in and out of Edwards AFB for a decade before that (been blinded flying over the solar farm east of there too). Ms Jackson is spot on in everything she says.

However, there is a lot NOT to love about them.

My last boss in CA is a 'Birder'. I consider him a responsible conservationist (rational) and not a rabid 'environmentalist' (emotive) by any measure - He IS an engineer after all. He's a member of the Audubon Society and often burns some of his vacation time in the mountains just north of Tehachapi doing volunteer work collecting data on migratory birds. It turns out that the Tehachapi wind farm is planted right in the middle of the Pacific Flyway, one of the major U.S. migratory bird routes. (They have pretty much the same problem at Altamont.)

Birders (like him) refer to these wind generators as "Bird Cuisinarts" or "fill-in-bird-name-here" Cuisinarts. At certain times of the year dead birds are known to pile up at the bases of towers.

Hmmmm..."Well Sited" eh?

Here's a map of the major migratory bird routes in the United States.
And here is where the best wind (class 3 or above) for wind turbines is found in the U.S.

Now, here's an overlay of the two maps (grey areas indicate suitable winds):

It makes one wonder: perhaps smart birds use the wind to their advantage, or that the same conditions that create high winds (like mountain ridges) might also have some other aspect (shelter?) that facilitates bird migration?

It also irritates me that when advocates of Wind Power talk about “waste streams” they never mention the waste stream from manufacturing wind generator systems and infrastructure. I live just off a major interstate and I frequently see trucks with loads of huge generator blades and housings made out of composites – and composite work tends to have nasty waste byproducts, and electronics often do as well.

Wind power conceivably has lower or more benign waste streams compared to many other energy sources but nonetheless there still has to be one. I say conceivably, because I don't think even the industry really knows: they’re taken at face value as being ‘better’ than other power sources.