"Might As Well Face It, America, You're Addicted To Oil".....Nickel Bag - Anyone Interested?
That's the weirdest statement coming out of the SOTU address. Someone who refuses to mandate minimum gas mileage requirements, talks about using Ethenol (which by the by expends more gasoline in the processing than is received from it), and has made the big fat ZERO effort to reign in the out of control profiteering by big oil. Crazy. It is a crazy time. I am reading Crimes Against Nature and it makes me physically ill to even think about the abuses that are going on. It goes so far beyond the wolf guarding the hen house. It's like....the child molester being in charge of a boarding school of orphans. People who have absolute contempt for the environment are in charge of it. I wonder if the general consensus in Washington is kind of like when a kid has to eat his spinach. They don't like it. They didn't ask for it. But it's there, it's not going away, so hold your nose and get it down as quickly as possible and hope for a future devoid of spinach. I cannot fathom people with more power than me sitting and watching what's going on in ever aspect of our government and not hurling into their office trashcan.
I have never been interested in politics, simply because I do not play that corporate game. Shmoozing to me is like wading through sewage. The stench, the total grossness is too much. Some might look at this as a quality, most see it, however, as a thorn. A speed bump. Someone who won't go along. "Why are you making such a big deal?" "Why do you have a problem with this?" The tactic is to isolate and make you feel like you're hysterical. Out of control. Uninformed. Out of your league. Alone in your concerns. It spans from dealing with teachers to principals to elected officials to judges to prosecutors. But I think that's a huge problem right now. People not wanting to rock the boat. No one wants to become a target. No one wants everyone to look at them with the "now what??!!" expression. But people have to start speaking up. Making the calls. Keeping the motivation after the outrage. That's so hard. But it's worth it.
Blah blah blah.
Back to the whole energy thing. Read this and think about what direction we are taking. And let's not forget that over thirty years ago, we had little orange electric cars motoring around. Thirty years ago. My son's Ipod that he got in September has been obsolete since December. Technology sure can move when we want it to.
Oh, and another quick note to GM, Ford, American car companies in general - psssst! Toyota is doing really, really well. Might want to look into (cough) the whole hybrid idea. Not the two extra miles per gallon that you guys are putting out now but the kind where I can drive for a month without filling up. Just a suggestion for our image conscious motor car makers.
The Energy Bill passed and was signed into law by President Bush on Aug 8th, 2005.
A sound energy policy would focus on conservation, efficiency and CLEAN renewables (like wind and solar -- no "biomass" incinerators) and that we need a clean fuels policy that reduces our oil consumption and moves us towards CLEAN hydrogen fuel cells (using hydrogen separated from water with wind and solar electricity).
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 does just the opposite. It's without question the most environmentally-damaging national legislation ever to be passed in the U.S. It's a gigantic subsidy bill, providing support to almost every conceivable dirty energy technology, including nuclear power, fossil fuels, and polluting "alternative" fuels. The Energy Bill passed the House of Representatives on April 21, 2005 [See how they voted] and the Senate on June 28, 2005 [See how they voted].
The different versions were merged into a final version by the House-Senate conference committee and completed late Monday night, July 25th, 2005. The final bill had only been available on the government's legislative website for under 48 hours before the bill cruised through the House on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 [See how they voted], and came to a vote in the Senate on the afternoon of Friday, July 29, 2005 [See how they voted]. Like most large bills of this sort, it's unlikely that any legislators had even read the legislation before voting on it. A week later (Aug 8th, 2005), it was signed into law by President Bush.
Unlike in 2003, the Democrats in the Senate didn't even try to stop the bill with a filibuster. Individual Senators have the power to filibuster a bill by talking forever until the Senate leadership gives up and moves on to another issue. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. In 2003, a filibuster stopped the energy bill. At the time, the bill was 2 votes away from the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster. 10 Democrats voted the wrong way. We only won at that time because 6 Republicans voted the right way.
In 2003, the filibuster was focused around the MTBE liability waiver. In 2005, that waiver was removed (though a provision to move MTBE lawsuits to federal courts remained), avoiding the issue that prevented the bill's passage in 2003. Another super-controversial issue (drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) was also left out of the bill, to avoid an inevitable filibuster. By focusing so intently on the ANWR issue, the environmental movement put too many eggs in one basket and lost everything else in the process.
The energy bill will...
increase gasoline prices (according to Bush's own Department of Energy)
do nothing to reduce our reliance on oil imports
do nothing to increase auto fuel efficiency
do nothing to transition our electricity sector towards clean renewable energy
inventory the U.S. coastlines for oil and gas, to make way for future drilling in our coastal waters
trample state's rights to protect their coasts from liquefied natural gas terminals (used so we can go to war for gas as well as oil, now that we're running out of natural gas in North America)
require ethanol use, increasing gas prices [mention this if you're in a Western or New England state, where ethanol would need to be imported from the mid-west]
make us more vulnerable to terrorism by building more juicy terrorist targets (new nuclear reactors and a new gas pipeline from Alaska)
throw many billions of tax dollars into the expensive and polluting nuclear power industry
promote nuclear proliferation by reversing long-standing U.S. policy against reprocessing waste from commercial nuclear reactors, and using plutonium to generate commercial energy
promote building more coal power plants
provide incentives to cut down our national forests for energy production
For an overview of the history of the Energy Bill up until late January 2004, read THE ENERGY BILL: The Environment’s Worst Nightmare.
That's the weirdest statement coming out of the SOTU address. Someone who refuses to mandate minimum gas mileage requirements, talks about using Ethenol (which by the by expends more gasoline in the processing than is received from it), and has made the big fat ZERO effort to reign in the out of control profiteering by big oil. Crazy. It is a crazy time. I am reading Crimes Against Nature and it makes me physically ill to even think about the abuses that are going on. It goes so far beyond the wolf guarding the hen house. It's like....the child molester being in charge of a boarding school of orphans. People who have absolute contempt for the environment are in charge of it. I wonder if the general consensus in Washington is kind of like when a kid has to eat his spinach. They don't like it. They didn't ask for it. But it's there, it's not going away, so hold your nose and get it down as quickly as possible and hope for a future devoid of spinach. I cannot fathom people with more power than me sitting and watching what's going on in ever aspect of our government and not hurling into their office trashcan.
I have never been interested in politics, simply because I do not play that corporate game. Shmoozing to me is like wading through sewage. The stench, the total grossness is too much. Some might look at this as a quality, most see it, however, as a thorn. A speed bump. Someone who won't go along. "Why are you making such a big deal?" "Why do you have a problem with this?" The tactic is to isolate and make you feel like you're hysterical. Out of control. Uninformed. Out of your league. Alone in your concerns. It spans from dealing with teachers to principals to elected officials to judges to prosecutors. But I think that's a huge problem right now. People not wanting to rock the boat. No one wants to become a target. No one wants everyone to look at them with the "now what??!!" expression. But people have to start speaking up. Making the calls. Keeping the motivation after the outrage. That's so hard. But it's worth it.
Blah blah blah.
Back to the whole energy thing. Read this and think about what direction we are taking. And let's not forget that over thirty years ago, we had little orange electric cars motoring around. Thirty years ago. My son's Ipod that he got in September has been obsolete since December. Technology sure can move when we want it to.
Oh, and another quick note to GM, Ford, American car companies in general - psssst! Toyota is doing really, really well. Might want to look into (cough) the whole hybrid idea. Not the two extra miles per gallon that you guys are putting out now but the kind where I can drive for a month without filling up. Just a suggestion for our image conscious motor car makers.
The Energy Bill passed and was signed into law by President Bush on Aug 8th, 2005.
A sound energy policy would focus on conservation, efficiency and CLEAN renewables (like wind and solar -- no "biomass" incinerators) and that we need a clean fuels policy that reduces our oil consumption and moves us towards CLEAN hydrogen fuel cells (using hydrogen separated from water with wind and solar electricity).
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 does just the opposite. It's without question the most environmentally-damaging national legislation ever to be passed in the U.S. It's a gigantic subsidy bill, providing support to almost every conceivable dirty energy technology, including nuclear power, fossil fuels, and polluting "alternative" fuels. The Energy Bill passed the House of Representatives on April 21, 2005 [See how they voted] and the Senate on June 28, 2005 [See how they voted].
The different versions were merged into a final version by the House-Senate conference committee and completed late Monday night, July 25th, 2005. The final bill had only been available on the government's legislative website for under 48 hours before the bill cruised through the House on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 [See how they voted], and came to a vote in the Senate on the afternoon of Friday, July 29, 2005 [See how they voted]. Like most large bills of this sort, it's unlikely that any legislators had even read the legislation before voting on it. A week later (Aug 8th, 2005), it was signed into law by President Bush.
Unlike in 2003, the Democrats in the Senate didn't even try to stop the bill with a filibuster. Individual Senators have the power to filibuster a bill by talking forever until the Senate leadership gives up and moves on to another issue. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. In 2003, a filibuster stopped the energy bill. At the time, the bill was 2 votes away from the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster. 10 Democrats voted the wrong way. We only won at that time because 6 Republicans voted the right way.
In 2003, the filibuster was focused around the MTBE liability waiver. In 2005, that waiver was removed (though a provision to move MTBE lawsuits to federal courts remained), avoiding the issue that prevented the bill's passage in 2003. Another super-controversial issue (drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) was also left out of the bill, to avoid an inevitable filibuster. By focusing so intently on the ANWR issue, the environmental movement put too many eggs in one basket and lost everything else in the process.
The energy bill will...
increase gasoline prices (according to Bush's own Department of Energy)
do nothing to reduce our reliance on oil imports
do nothing to increase auto fuel efficiency
do nothing to transition our electricity sector towards clean renewable energy
inventory the U.S. coastlines for oil and gas, to make way for future drilling in our coastal waters
trample state's rights to protect their coasts from liquefied natural gas terminals (used so we can go to war for gas as well as oil, now that we're running out of natural gas in North America)
require ethanol use, increasing gas prices [mention this if you're in a Western or New England state, where ethanol would need to be imported from the mid-west]
make us more vulnerable to terrorism by building more juicy terrorist targets (new nuclear reactors and a new gas pipeline from Alaska)
throw many billions of tax dollars into the expensive and polluting nuclear power industry
promote nuclear proliferation by reversing long-standing U.S. policy against reprocessing waste from commercial nuclear reactors, and using plutonium to generate commercial energy
promote building more coal power plants
provide incentives to cut down our national forests for energy production
For an overview of the history of the Energy Bill up until late January 2004, read THE ENERGY BILL: The Environment’s Worst Nightmare.
Comments