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Great Clip, found on Melvin Udall’s Journal

I put a lot of clips on this blog but this is one you NEED to watch.

The Seventies have returned in all of their glory, with inflation looming, high gas prices, alternative fuels, CAFE standards, and now, you guessed it, an attempt to bring back the 55 mile per hour speed limit. RINO John Warner wants to return the era of Disco, ostensibly to save gas at the expense of human freedom and of lives.

James Baxter, President of the National Motorist Association, is perplexed by this retro attempt at mindless stupidity:

“The same forces that resisted the use of fire many thousands of years ago are still with us, only now they are advocating the return of the national maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour.

“Anyone who endured the last 22 year long “experiment“ with the “folly of 55“ knows that this proposal goes beyond being absurd.

“The only likely beneficiaries are insurance companies (ticket surcharges), local governments that live off speed traps, P.R. firms (the genius creators of public service ads like “Save Gas Save Lives, Drive 55“) and perhaps the radar detector industry. In return, the driving public is treated to aggravation, maddening traffic flow, tickets, bloated insurance premiums, and billions of hours of lost time.

“As in 1973, the justification for a snail’s pace speed limit on major highways is that it will save gasoline (and now reduce global warming).”

READ THE REST

Some good news about the general population’s attitude towards who’s to blame for the nosebleeding at the pump and what to do about it:

Even as the price of oil nearly doubled over the last year, the percentage of Americans pointing the finger of blame at oil companies fell, from 37% a year ago to 20%.

And 57% favor drilling in areas of the US that are currrently off limits.

Be still my beating heart. Could it be that the Moron Block that keep fucking up Washington DC and our country with their less-than-rudimentary understanding of even the most basic of facts are beginning to add two and two, arriving at a number approaching 4?

Doubtful, but our incurable optimism and trust and faith in our fellow man (and womyn) will not be denied, so here’s the next exercise for those out there who are finally beginning, for the first time in their overrated, almost entirely useless existences, to find a Clue™:

Now that you, some of you anyway, are finally beginning to grasp that the reason for increasing prices is increasing demand coupled with no commensurate increase in SUPPLY, perhaps it is time for you to take another step into the real world that those of us with functioning synapses are forced to share with you:

READ THE REST HERE  Liberals pay close attention!

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This is the Democratic Energy Policy. Someone to explain to me how any of these policies will help our current crisis?
Democrat asks public to push for oil-policy changes

First they misdiagnose the Problem:
Price of oil, fostered by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney’s close ties to the oil industry, is no longer just a burden.

Democratic Solution:

The Democratic proposals for changing energy policy. Those call for:

• Ending billions of dollars in tax breaks for big oil companies.

• Forcing the oil companies to invest some of their profits in clean and affordable alternative energy.

• Protecting the American people from price gougers and greedy oil traders who manipulate the market.

• Temporarily stopping the diversion of oil to the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is 97 percent full.

• Standing up to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other oil-producing nations that are working together to keep oil prices high.

The biggest threat to America is not terrorism, or illegal immigration, or any other made up political talking points propaganda. The biggest threat to America is IGNORANCE!

Article Link 

The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.
Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius.

The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?

You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.

However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.

So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.

One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.

If that article was not enough here is an older piece with some interesting 411.

Ford was losing $2,000 to $3,000 for every hybrid it sold because consumers won’t pay the entire $6,000 extra that it costs to produce a hybrid over its gas-powered counterpart. Never mind also that in the real world — outside of the Environmental Protection Agency’s tax-payer funded testing sites — hybrids don’t deliver anywhere close to the gas mileage that the agency attributes to them, as auto-writer Richard Burr reported in the Weekly Standard.

Full article link

By Thomas Sowell - Link

With gasoline prices rising, political rhetoric is rising even faster. Liberals in Congress and in the media have launched a war of words, whose net result may well be a demand for some form of price control.

Price controls are not a new idea. There have been price controls in countries around the world. There were price controls during ancient times in Babylon and in the Roman Empire.

Whatever the hopes that may have inspired price controls, economists have studied their actual consequences, which have been remarkably similar from one place to another and from one time to another — and almost invariably bad.

That history has even included higher prices in places with price controls. For example, New York and San Francisco have severe rent control laws — and some of the highest average rents in the country.

But those pushing for price controls on gasoline are not likely to go into facts about the consequences of price controls, much less go into the economics that explains why such bad consequences have repeatedly followed price controls.

This issue, like so many others, is likely to be settled on the basis of rhetoric. And, on that basis, the left has always had the advantage.

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Sphere: Related Content

WASHINGTON — Democrats, seething at the injustice of gasoline prices, have sprung to the aid of embattled motorists. So resolute are Democrats about defending the downtrodden, they are undeterred by the fact that motorists, not acting like people trodden upon, are driving more than ever. Gasoline consumption has increased 2.14 percent during the last year.

That probably is explained by the inconvenient (to the Democrats’ narrative) truth that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was characteristically overwrought when she said that Democrats intend to do this and that because the price of gasoline recently “set a record” at $3.07 a gallon. In real (inflation-adjusted) rather than nominal dollars, $3.07 is less than gasoline cost in 1981.

Pelosi vowed, as politicians have been doing since President Nixon set the fashion, to achieve “energy independence.” Such vows are, as Soviet grain production quotas used to be, irrational reflexes that no serious person takes seriously. Pelosi baldly asserts that “energy independence is essential to reducing the price at the pump,” but does not say how.

As Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes, there is no yearning for national self-sufficiency concerning other essential goods, such as food, automobiles, airplanes or medicines. Are Democrats worried about security of oil supplies? In some ways, Hayward says, America’s energy supply is more secure than it was in the 1970s, partly because “since 1975, energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product has fallen 48 percent.” Furthermore, “oil represents a shrinking share of total U.S. energy consumption — from 44 percent in 1970 to 40 percent in 2005.” The oil America consumes — only one-eighth of which comes from the Middle East — is used almost entirely in transportation, and accounts for about 40 percent of energy uses. Half of America’s electricity is generated by coal, of which America has a huge abundance.

Read the rest by George Will at Real Clear Politics