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| 5/23 |
| 2008/8/6-10 [Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:50791 Activity:low |
8/6 Maybe Obama is just too weird
http://tinyurl.com/59325e
\_ What, you aren't going with the tire guage attack?
Maybe you can go the "celeb" route and attack him for being too
damn charismatic. I mean shit, that's always a good reason to
hate some.
\_ Oh man, I so want one of those tire gauges. Pure comedy. -!pp
\_ Wow, I didn't even know about the tire gauge attacks. The
Republicans are attacking Obama now because he told them
the truth about something? The GOP is more out of touch and
delusional than I had even imagined. And I imagined that they
were pretty out of touch.
"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant," Obama said.
\_ The truth? Obama's "inflate your tires == drilling" moment is
the truth? Sorry, not so.
\_ Ahh, there we go. I've been waiting for you to start
spewing this kind of crap. Are you going to start
ranting about how obama thought he claimed tire guages
next?
\_ "Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple
thing, but we could save all the oil that they're
talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was
just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups.
You could actually save just as much." -- Obama
\_ And? Someone asked "How can I help?" and Obama
told him. How DARE he! Let's go give McCain a huge
campagin donation so he will change his votes on
offshore drilling! (Oh wait, too late)
\_ Obama made a specific claim: that proper
inflation on your tires, regular oil changes, and
tune ups would save *AS MUCH OIL* as we'd get from
increased drilling. This is patently false, and
simply laughable. It also doesn't take into
account how to *grow* our economy.
\_ You are as ignorant as Limbaugh.
\_ Ad hominem! Excellent sir!
\_ "Simply laughable."
\_ Why is it simply laughable?
\_ Do you believe that we cannot grow our economy
without increasing oil consumption?
\_ Is Obama correct? Inflating your tires would
save more oil than we would get by drilling
offshore. You do know that Obama is correct about
this, right?
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6oy9uk
\_ Nope: http://preview.tinyurl.com/5fqnrq
\_ In other words, Obama was right. Powerline adds
in 1T barrels from Oil Shale, which is clearly
not gotten by drilling.
\_ Um, no. The barrels/day extracted number is
based on the *profitable* extraction, where
oil was at $60/barrel in 2008 -- which it
isn't.
\_ Dude, you are amazing. I want to have
sex with you RIGHT NOW.
\_ So you honestly believe that some
partisan blogger is more accurate in his
prediction of how much energy is
profitably extractable from the OCS than
the experts? Simply laughable.
\_ Appeal to authority! Excellent if you
don't care about the truth of an
argument.
\_ Too bad Obama listens to guys
like petroleum engineers and guys
who are petroleum engineers and guys
with PhDs in economics. He could be
like the GOP and get all his
policy ideas from blowhard internet
bloggers who have so far never
been right about anything. But then
he would be a Republican, not a
Democrat. "It's like these guys
take pride in being ignorant."
been right about anything. "It's
like these guys take pride in
being ignorant."
\_ The quote I saw had Obama
doing his own poorly thought
out back of the evelope
calculation. -!pp
\_ If true, he deserves to be
made fun of then.
\_ http://preview.tinyurl.com/62asue
Scroll down to the 1T line. Read the
comments section to see where he gets
eviscerated for including oil shale,
I don't have time to repeat it.
Scroll down to the 1T line.
\_ Not only is there the magic 1T
barrels, the dude also ignored
the bit about tuneups. Nor is that
Obama's energy plan. It is his
answer to "how can I help." Energy
plans good. Personal conservation,
especailly "free" conservation good.
Combined even better. Why does that
make you so sad? Is it too communist
for you or something?
\_ Uh, modern cars don't have tuneups.
\_ Uh, yes they do. But instead of
not working without them they
tend just to work less
efficiently. Still, moving parts
go out of tolerances after 1000's
of miles, modern or not. |
| 5/23 |
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| tinyurl.com/59325e -> www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1111130&format=text Since the day Obama claimed the Democratic nomination, pundits and political pros have been waiting for him to take a significant lead in the polls. Here we are in August, and not only has Obama failed to get the Democrat's traditional summertime bump, he's tied with John McCain in the latest Gallup and Rasmussen polls. In a lousy year for Republicans, against a GOP nominee who combines the youthful effervescence of Wilford Brimley with the soaring oratory of a life insurance seminar, Obama is actually losing ground. It's all about evil Republicans, he claims, trying to scare voters by telling them "I don't look like those guys on the dollar bills" and "Did I mention he's black?" The mainstream media blame the "vicious" and "negative" attack ads of the McCain campaign. The McCain campaign thinks it's all about oil, gas prices and Obama's position on offshore drilling - whatever that may be at the moment. But it was during a conversation with my radio listeners about Obama's birthday trip to Boston yesterday that I got a glimpse into the Chosen One's real problem. We were looking for the perfect gift for "The man who is everything" and I was suggesting the traditional items for someone of Obama's stature - gold, frankincense and myrrh. I was taken aback by the number of listeners who said the Democratic standard-bearer should get nothing because of a People magazine article about the Obama family's policy of not giving Christmas or birthday presents to their own two daughters. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with parents not giving their kids birthday or holiday gifts, but it is, well, unusual. Then there was that speech in Berlin that was supposed to give Obama a big bounce. But there was something just plain weird about watching a guy who wanted votes from Americans rallying 200,000 Germans in Berlin. But no other presidential candidate in history has ever done anything like it. And as silly as it may sound, the Wall Street Journal just ran a story on supersized voters uncomfortable with the fact that Obama is so skinny. "He needs to put some meat on his bones," one voter said. Then again, this is the Obama who asked Iowa farmers, "Have you seen what they charge for arugula lately?" Even his own daughter, revealing to "Access Hollywood" that her dad doesn't like ice cream, added: "Everybody should like ice cream." Thanks to the strange trajectory of my life, from the tobacco fields of South Carolina to a radio studio in Boston, I've met people from all kinds of strange and colorful backgrounds. And I can honestly say I don't know anybody like Barack Obama. His political career began at the home of an anti-American terrorist. His pastor for 20 years was the delusional, hate-spewing Rev. He barely won his own party's nomination, but his campaign designed its own presidential seal and has "President" printed across the back of his seat on his campaign jet. And when he told congressional Democrats "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," it might be true - but what kind of person would say that about himself? Every day, it seems, Barack Obama does or says something that reminds "typical American people" (pardon the paraphrase) that he is different from us in ways that have nothing to do with what he looks like. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/6oy9uk -> www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1829354,00.html He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters. The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. But that's not what's so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis -- the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less. The RNC is trying to make the tire gauge a symbol of unseriousness, as if only the fatuous believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil without doing the bidding of Big Oil. But the tire gauge is really a symbol of a very serious piece of good news: we can use significantly less energy without significantly changing our lifestyle. The energy guru Amory Lovins has shown that investment in "nega-watts" -- reduced electricity use through efficiency improvements -- is much more cost-effective than investment in new megawatts, and the same is clearly true of nega-barrels. It might not fit the worldviews of right-wingers who deny the existence of global warming and insist that reducing emissions would destroy our economy, or of left-wing Earth-firsters who insist that maintaining our creature comforts would destroy the world, but there's a lot of simple things we can do on the demand side before we start rushing to ratchet up supply. We can unplug our televisions, computers and phone chargers when we're not using them. We can seal our windows, install more insulation and adjust our thermostats so that we waste less heat and air-conditioning. We can use more-efficient appliances, build more-efficient homes and drive more-efficient cars, preferably with government assistance. And, yes, we can inflate our tires and tune our engines, as Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Charlie Crist of Florida have urged, apparently without consulting the RNC. While we're at it, we can cut down on idling, which can improve fuel economy another 5%, and cut down on speeding and unnecessary acceleration, which can increase mileage as much as 20%. There are other ways to reduce demand for oil -- more public transportation, more carpooling, more telecommuting, more recycling, less exurban sprawl, fewer unnecessary car trips, buying less stuff and eating less meat -- that would require at least some lifestyle changes. But things like tire gauges can reduce gas bills and carbon emissions now, with little pain and at little cost and without the ecological problems and oil-addiction problems associated with offshore drilling. These are the proverbial win-win-win solutions, reducing the pain of $100 trips to the gas station by reducing trips to the gas station. It's hard to see why anyone who isn't affiliated with the oil industry would object to them. Of course, in recent years, the Republican Party has been affiliated with the oil industry. It was the oilman Dick Cheney who dismissed conservation as a mere sign of "personal virtue," not a basis for energy policy. It was the oilman George W Bush who resisted efforts to regulate carbon emissions. And most congressional Republicans have been even more reliable water carriers for the industry's interests. and he opposed Bush's pork-stuffed energy bill, which Obama supported. He also opposed efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and until recently opposed new offshore drilling. But now that gas prices have spiked, McCain is running for President on a drill-first platform, and polls suggest that most Americans agree with him. It's sad to see his campaign adopting the politics of the tire gauge, promoting the fallacy that Americans are powerless to address their own energy problems. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/5fqnrq -> www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/08/021171.php The Same Man August 5, 2008 Time Tries to Salvage Obama's Gaffe Barack Obama's suggestion that we can't drill our way out of the current energy shortage, but we can solve the problem through tire inflation, has been the source of much hilarity. Time magazine has rushed to the defense of its candidate, arguing that "Obama is right." The author of the article, Michael Grunwald, mixes apple-and-orange statistics to try to create the false impression that there is more to be gained by inflating tires than through offshore drilling: The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. Grunwald is trying, through sleight of hand, to conceal certain basic facts: Obama said that tire inflation could save energy equal to "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling," not just the outer continental shelf; the outer continental shelf, ANWR and Rocky Mountain oil shale contain an estimated one trillion, 28 billion barrels of oil--an estimate that is undoubtedly low--while the maximum savings that could be attained through tire inflation and tuneups, assuming that every single vehicle in America is driving around with semi-flat tires and has never had a tuneup, is a mere 420 million barrels per year. But there are more devious errors lurking behind Time's claim that "Obama is right." Notice the curious formula that Grunwald uses to quantify the energy potential of the outer continental shelf: The Bush administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. Which may sound like a lot, but amounts to only four-tenths of one percent of the OCS's 18 billion barrels. Further, why is Time not only putting out an absurdly low number, but also talking about the year 2030? The implication seems to be that the oil wouldn't flow until then, or maybe wouldn't peak until then, but such a claim would be patently false. To get to the bottom of the puzzle, I tracked down the source of the statistic that Grunwald attributes to the "Bush administration." this is it: the Annual Energy Outlook 2007 with Projections to 2030, as published by the Energy Information Administration. gif As you can see, the projected recovery from OCS drilling in 2030 is around 200,000 barrels per day. EIA projects recovery to begin around 2018, but as you can see from the graph, EIA projected that only a tiny percentage of the 18 billion barrels (minimum) under the OCS would be recovered. The explanation, obviously, lies in the set of assumptions used by the EIA in creating its forecast. The forecast was not based on the amount of oil that the OCS actually contains, it was based on the amount that was predicted to be economically remunerative at the then-prevailing price of oil. The EIA report makes this explicit: Although a significant volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources is added in the OCS access case, conversion of those resources to production would require both time and money. In addition, the average field size in the Pacific and Atlantic regions tends to be smaller than the average in the Gulf of Mexico, implying that a significant portion of the additional resource would not be economically attractive to develop at the reference case prices. The obvious question, for anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of economics, is, What are the reference case prices? gif That's right: the EIA, writing in early 2007, assumed that oil prices would decline from their 2006 peak; that in 2008, the price of crude oil would be around $60 a barrel; that it would continue to decline until around 2013 to a low of about $50 a barrel; and that the price would then gradually increase to a little under $60 a barrel by 2030. Those were the assumptions on which EIA concluded that it would not be economically profitable to get most OCS oil out of the ground. Currently crude oil is at around $120 per barrel, not $60. At the elevated prices we are now experiencing and are expected to experience in the future, vastly greater quantities of OCS oil (or ANWR oil, or shale oil) can profitably be exploited, and those resources can make a vastly greater contribution to our economic well-being. When we read wildly inaccurate reporting in the mainstream media, it's often hard to tell whether the reporter is incompetent, or is deliberately trying to deceive. For now, suffice it to say that Time's attempt to rehabilitate Obama's tire-inflation gaffe is a failure. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/62asue -> www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/07/021122.php Why was Obama a no-show at Landstuhl, Part Two July 30, 2008 Get This Man A Teleprompter! If you give him a script, he can deliver it pretty well. But if he tries to talk without a script that has been written for him by others, he quickly reveals that he is poorly-informed if not downright ignorant. Today he delivered another classic, by claiming that if only we would all properly inflate our tires, we could save as much gasoline as "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling." Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let's be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 15%, that would be 18 billion gallons. How does this stack up against "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling?" ANWR: 10 billion barrels Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned) Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling." He gives the impression of being an intelligent guy, but through his unscripted comments we have learned that he knows little about history, science or mathematics. He also seems rather shockingly short on common sense, as this most recent gaffe illustrates. |