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| 5/23 |
| 2008/8/8-13 [Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:50825 Activity:kinda low |
8/8 Drive Naked, Save America
http://tinyurl.com/6xmyer [cnn.com]
\_ Is this worse or better than reducing the national speed
limit back to 55 (and 65 in some cases)?
\_ This is better than handing out tire gauges how?
\_ For one thing, there would be lots of naked chicks on the road.
\_ And more accidents.
\_ Drilling for oil in the OCS is going to have a negligible effect,
too. As much as it will pain conservatives, they are just going
to have to learn to live with less oil.
\_ And you won't?
\_ Since I already don't own a car, I doubt it will have a
huge impact on me. Perhaps on food prices, but that is
a very small part of my budget.
\_ The price of oil affects the price of almost everything.
\_ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html
Too bad the conservatives blocked the CAFE standards
from going up for all those years.
\_ Yeah, incinerating trash sure sounds environmentally
correct.
\_ This is moronic. Way more oil would have to go towards climate
control because clothing helps people regulate temperature. This
guy ridicules Obama for proposing a good idea and being stumped
that the Republicans would mock him for it. Its dumbass partisan
politics to mock someone for an idea you agree with. May as well
mock yourself. |
| 5/23 |
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| tinyurl.com/6xmyer -> www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/07/beck.energy/index.html Next Article in Politics By Glenn Beck CNN Decrease font Decrease font Enlarge font Enlarge font Editor's note: Glenn Beck is on CNN Headline News nightly at 7 and 9 ET and also hosts a conservative national radio talk show. Glenn Beck Glenn Beck says conservation won't solve energy crisis, and we need more oil drilling in the US NEW YORK (CNN) -- Call our politicians and tell them to stay on vacation. Call the caribou roaming in Alaska and tell them they're safe. Call the Saudi king and tell him what you really think of his oil. You've probably got on a shirt, socks, shoes, jewelry, maybe even some pants. If people really loved America, they would strip down, leave their clothes at home, and drive around buck naked. "Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing," Obama said. "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. When The Associated Press asked Obama's campaign for the figures they used to make that claim, they couldn't produce any -- but plenty of other people have. Glenn Beck on Headline News It turns out that about two-thirds of vehicles already have properly inflated tires. That means we'd likely save somewhere around 800,000 barrels of oil a day if everyone else also complied. Meanwhile, the US Minerals Management Service estimates that there are about 86 billion barrels of oil in the areas that we're not allowed to drill. But, facts aside, Obama seemed to be stunned that Republicans would dare ridicule an idea as revolutionary as checking your tire pressure. "They're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption," he complained. No, what they're making fun of is that a guy who, less than two months earlier, was against the gas tax holiday because it was a "gimmick," has suddenly embraced what is essentially a gimmick. John McCain, disputes that keeping your tires inflated will help you get better gas mileage. But so will emptying your trunk, buying a hybrid, not using the heat, and driving naked. they're unsustainable gimmicks that distract people from solving the underlying crisis. They're also exactly the type of things that Obama once claimed he was against. But, of course, the adoring mainstream media doesn't want to talk about that, they just want to defend Obama's honor. Michael Grunwald recently wrote an article titled, "The Tire-Gauge Solution: No Joke," that probably would've been harsher on Obama if it was written by Barack himself. "Meanwhile," he wrote, "efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3 percent and regular maintenance can add another 4 percent. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. But one phrase that he used deserves a little more attention: "but if everyone did." "But if everyone" donated their organs then people wouldn't die waiting for them. "But if everyone" ate only lettuce then our health care system would be fixed. "But if everyone" just sent me one dollar then I'd retire with $300 million in the bank. Of course, the reality is that people still die waiting for organs, obesity is an epidemic, and I'm still writing these columns. That's why saying "but if everyone did" is such a red herring. Grunwald went on to suggest that perhaps we're just over-thinking this whole "energy crisis" thing. "If our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less." Saying "we ought to" is exactly the same as "but if everyone" -- a way to make a ridiculous point sound plausible. It's like saying: We ought to all live in peace and harmony. But let's follow his yellow brick road for a second anyway. If we all put on our Jimmy Carter sweaters and used less oil, we'd still need millions of barrels. How about making sure those barrels come from America by starting to drill for it now? We'll never be truly free until we're completely free from Middle Eastern oil. Not surprisingly, drilling was nowhere to be found in the article, but Grunwald did include plenty of other, "simple" things we can do: "We can use those twisty carbon fluorescent light bulbs. We can unplug our televisions, computers and phone chargers when we're not using them." Not only is unplugging a television not going to do a darn thing, it's annoying and almost no one in their right mind will ever, ever, ever, ever do it! And finally, just in case you weren't yet sure if Grunwald's article was essentially a commercial for Obama, here's how he ended it: "It's sad to see (McCain's) campaign adopting the politics of the tire gauge, promoting the fallacy that Americans are powerless to address their own energy problems. " Hmm, let me think, where have I heard "Yes we can" before? Ohhh, that's right, it's what Obama supporters chant at his speeches. But can we criticize him for embracing the same kind of gimmicky stall tactics that have gotten us to this place? The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. |
| www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html Go to Columnist Page The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons -- maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on -- how do I say this delicately -- what exactly you're flushing. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland! After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 pm rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I'd go to work that way, too. What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy -- while barely growing their energy consumption -- and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's minister of climate and energy: "No." It just forced them to innovate more -- like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had "a positive impact on job creation," added Hedegaard. "For example, the wind industry -- it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark." In the last 10 years, Denmark's exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. "It is one of our fastest-growing export areas," said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 16 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, "we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic. are going up," Denmark's prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. "The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income -- so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy." Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas -- Denmark's and the world's biggest wind turbine company -- told me that he simply can't understand how the US Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America. |
| cnn.com -> www.cnn.com/ About 250 prisoners freed from Abu Ghraib The United States today freed about 250 detainees from Abu Ghraib prison, site of alleged abuses that prompted global outrage and led to days of hearings on Capitol Hill. Today marks the first mass prisoner release since the abuse scandal broke several weeks ago. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had visited the prison Thursday. |