With a slumping economy and high rising cost of fuel and just about everything else, which candidate will be better to fix America’s problems?
Click here to vote:
– John McCain
– Barack Obama
– You’re too disgusted with politics to vote
Should America drill in ANWR, off the coast, construct nuclear power stations (following the similar path as the French model), and explore every possible way to become more independent from foreign oil?
Click here to vote:
– Yes, America must do it
– No, the environment is more important
– I don’t care. I’m moving to the North Pole
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
I’m moving to the North Pole.
I really cant understand why you people want four more years of this Bush administration. Off-shore drilling is not going to help. Drilling in The ANWAR is not going to help. We have the technology and the rescources to effect a sustainable environment while boosting our economy and creating countless new jobs. We just need a President that realizes this. We have the solution right in front of us, yet our red-neck administration fails to see it. Vote Obama.
Obama will do the same to America as Goichberg is doing to the USCF. Vote McCain!
I really cant understand why you people want four more years of Jimmy Carter. Off-shore drilling WILL help. Drilling in The ANWAR WILL help. We have the technology and the rescources to fix America’s energy problems. We just need a President that realizes this. We have the solution right in front of us, yet our liberal left wing Democrats can’t see it. Vote McCain.
Even if you really don’t like Obama, but….McCain isn’t an option really. He’s way too old to take charge of the US and tackle all the issues that are out there for the most powerful and most energy consuming country in the world; be it Foreign policy, Internal Social Affairs or Environmental Challenges.
He rather should be glad that he still lives on (in contrast to over 50,000 other Americans that went to Vietnam…) and he should be grateful to the North Vietnamese people who didn’t behead him after they caught him while dropping bombs on North Vietnamese cities…therefore he should enjoy the rest of his life together with his family and really don’t spend it with politics…
Last weekend I was watching one of the morning news shows and the comentator asked the representative for the petroleum industry why the gov’t should allow them to drill in restricted areas when they don’t drill in the areas they already are permitted. His answer was that they don’t drill in those areas because they don’t have the equipment needed. Well, why should we believe that they will have the equipment for new areas and why with their record profits and currently available undrilled areas haven’t they acquired the equipment? Don’t vote GOP (Gas and Oil Party).
The issues at hand are Iraq, the economy, healthcare, gas, and taxes.
McCain has a better policy on Iraq and in Foreign Policy in general. He won’t be talking to the enemy any time soon.
The economy mixed in with taxes has the edge toward McCain. He knows not to raise the taxes as doing so would ruin the economy.
Healthcare would cost nearly $700billion a year under Obama. Who would pay for it? The taxpayer who would already be paying higher taxes from everything else.
And gas. If we drill for our oil here instead of abroad it would get us off of foreign oil. Not doing anything would make people more anngry as gas would be higher and as a result your food prices would go up as well.
I honestly think McCain is a better choice because he actually has the experience behind him. Whereas if you vote for Obama, name one piece of legislation he got passed that would actually benefit Americans on the homefront.
The Democrats are pretty daft for thinking they now better than everyone else… and I’ll even cite an example. Clinton’s policy on terrorism is horrendous when you take into account is deriction of duty as the CinC. He should have been tried for high Crimes for not protecting US interests abroad or at home.
I’ll take McCain anydy of the week, especially if he gets someone as VP who knows the economy inside and out.
I’m not optimistic about the USA’s ability to drill itself into cheaper oil.
There are several different potential sources of oil under United States territory (including offshore)
(From here on out, I will refer to the USA as “WE”, as I am a US citizen, and I expect that most, but not all, of Susan’s readers are likewise.)
First off, there’s drill-able, conventional crude oil. The kind of thing you pump for. Taking into account ANWR, all offshore oil around the Florida Coast, both east and west coasts, what remains in the current wells, and smatterings around the rest of the country, there are estimates between 20 and 30 billion barrels of oil that the US can extract. Given our current rate of consumption, at 20 million barrels a day, our entire reserve of drillable oil would last 2.7 to 4.1 years only, assuming that was our only source.
Spread this out over 30 years, however (a likely scenario), and a 10% drop in consumption would offset ALL of the US domestic production. Given that we already drill around 5 million barrels a day, tapping ANWR and the coasts wouldn’t likely do much more we could achieve with a modest increase in efficiency.
Article on Oil Reserves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#United_States
Okay, so what about Tar Sands, Oil Shale and whatnot?
There’s a anwful lot more oil in the Bakken formation in North Dakota, as well as the Tar Sand formations in the Rocky mountain states and in South Dakota.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation
However, Oil from oil shale and tar sands is very energy intensive to extract. To do so requires massive amounts of energy, since the shale has to be heated up to release its Kerogen (the stuff that is chemically processed to turn into oil) or release it from the Tar Sands. Extraction from tar sands also pollutes massive amounts of water- which is, itself, very energy intensive to clean.
Most of the energy from current Tar Sand oil extraction (mostly in Canada) comes from on site natural gas, gas which otherwise would go into the market to heat homes and generate electricity. If we began to extract oil from tar sands on a scale massive enough to offset a reasonable portion of our oil usage, the price of natural gas would go up, as less of it would be flowing into the market. So, what we would save at the gas pump, we would pay in our gas or electric bill.
Moreover, these two forms of extraction require the complete stripping of a large plot of land of all of the “overburdon”- that is, to get it out you need to dig up entire mountains. Is this really worth it? Who wants to live next to a big, dirty hole in the ground?
Given that the proven reserves are finite, and will eventually run out, doesn’t it make sense to start planning for the future? I am reminded of the old saying: “If you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Our hole is dependence on oil. If we dig (aka drill) more, we’re just putting off the inevitable and getting us (that is, our economy) more and more deeply dependent on it. Our cities are already designed for the car, so we’ve really no way out of that, do we really want our infrastructure to continue to be dependent on a resource that is only likely to get more expensive as the years go by?
Also, we do more with oil than just burn it to move cars and heat and light our homes. We make plastics, rubber, chemicals, and all sorts of other things out of it. If we continue to burn oil, at some point in the future, these extraordinarily useful technologies will either disappear, or become prohibitively expensive. It’s always a good idea to have some reserve in perpetuity.
Moreover, none of this takes into account the fact that burning fossil fuels in internal combustion engines produces CO2 (burning in power plants potentially allows for sequestration, so I don’t include that) which, most climate scientists agree, is a major concern. (I’ll be happy to entertain all skepticism on this point in another post. Specificity would be appreciated.) Also, offshore drilling has, in the past, been equated with infrequent, but huge, environmental catastrophes which, themselves, have a large economic impact. (Re: Exxon Valdez) Imagine the damage to Florida tourism is an oil tanker ran aground near Miami Beach.
Finally, as a citizen of the USA, I would like to see us as a technological leader now and into the future. Development of new technologies can be seen as an opportunity. Imagine, if 25 years ago, people had said “gee, look at how expensive it would be for us to wire up communications networks across the entire country so that computers can talk to one another… I bet it would cost billions!” Looking at it that way, the potential cost of the creation of the thing we call the internet would have been seen as prohibitively expensive. However, the money we spent on this system led to a huge economic boom- every time we bought a computer or a router or whatnot, that money circulated in the economy and made a profit for someone.
Similarly when we say, today, “Gosh, look at how ridiculously expensive it would be to stick solar panels everywhere and windmills in windy places and figure out how to create fusion… etc,.,” I have to wonder how this is any different. If the USA would get off its butt and develop the industry to get these things out en masse, every solar panel, every windmill, every geothermal system, every potential fusion reactor would generate profit for some industry. If we leave it to Europe and China to develop these idustries, we’re going to be buying our energy technology from them and not benefitting our own pocketbooks here at home.
Alternative energy is an OPPORTUNITY!
This is why, I think drilling is shortsighted and, incidentally, why I think $4 gas is not so bad in the long term. It is also, in part, why I’ll be voting for Obama.
Brad Hoehne
The first of the candidates which comes out for nuclear energy as the option to address our energy crisis, will get my vote. Other countries (France for example) use nuclear energy for over 50% of their supply….but in the US we have not been able to achieve those numbers due to environmentalists and politiacian with not enough guts to take a firm position on how to address this energy crisis.
Regarding CONSERVATIVECHESSNUT’s “McCain has a better policy on Iraq and in Foreign Policy in general. He won’t be talking to the enemy any time soon.”
I find this sort of statement baffling. How is “talking to the enemy” necessarily a bad thing.
Just today the Bush Administration announced that it would be pushing to have North Korea taken off the terrorism “watch list” in a presumed effort to generate good will in advance of upcoming talks with North Korea. Explain to me how this is any different…
Several weeks ago Isreal concluded talks with Hamas, which resulted in a temporary truce (only broken yesterday when a rouge Islamic Jihad group took a few potshots at towns in Northern Isreal.)
Is this appeasement?
JFK saved all our hiney’s when he opted to talk to Krushchev instead of let military action do all the talking. Many historians attribute our continued, non-radioactive, existence to the fact that these two leaders allowed themselves to chill out a bit and negotiate.
True appeasement, a la, Chamberlin, is a bad thing. Just talking to your enemy is, quite often, not.
Brad Hoehne
Brad your summary is why I will vote for McCain. You miss the entire point.
It is stupid to put all your eggs into one basket called technology and hope you discover new technology that will bail you out. and then bring it to market in a week. Plain jane stupid.
My vote will not be to move the USA closer to a Dictatorship. Not even a millimeter.
I am a physicist. I know it will take a super long time to do enough to save even the use of one days worth of oil. Our oil use is way too high. We purchase that with borrowed money. We will be bankrupt long before your technology is even dreamed up.
All great powers throughout history from the greeks and romans to England have lost all their power because they went broke from one or both of two major mistakes.
1. maintaining a large standing army.
2. welfare for the masses like Rome did.
Obama’s welfare for the masses is a giant step toward Dictatorship. Dictators like Stalin maintained their power via robbing the rich and giving to the poor. Well that was the philosophy used to manipulate the minds of the citizens. You know. OBAMA’s message of entrapment of the minds of the people to get their votes. Do you really want to live in a Dictatorship like Russia had under the new Obama dictatorship.
Well of course it will not happen over night but it is a step in that direction.
Every gallon of oil we drill we do not have to borrow money to buy from another country. We need to immediately drill and build all the nuclear electric facilities as fast as we can. SIMULTANEOUSLY with all that we need big investment in new technology to get green energy. But the amount of green energy needed in enormous almost beyond belief. We can put a number on it but we can not really comprehend it.
We need to do it all or surrender our freedom. We need to do it all or wind up a bankrupt country. McCain understands the issues and is much more practical about the solutions. I am a life long democrat. I am over 60 and always vote. But I will vote McCain this time for my first ever republican vote.
OBAMA is simply telling the public what he knows will win votes. Watch as his eyes look down and away as he speaks certain things. That is when he is lieing. When he speaks of nothing he looks the person in the face but not on the important statements. The guy is phoney. Learn to read body language. Obama has terrible body language. Phoney as a wooden 3 cent nickle.
“.but in the US we have not been able to achieve those numbers due to environmentalists and politiacian with not enough guts to take a firm position on how to address this energy crisis.”
Nuclear power does have a bad name, and is likely a lot safer today than it was 30 years ago when we stopped building plants. And I, atoo, would be happy to see more nuclear power and would admire a candidate that was willing to say so in public.
However, I don’t see it as a perfect solution due to its environmental issues. Uranium effluent- that is, runoff from mines that pull the uranium from the ground, is a significant problem. Moreover, radioactive waste needs to be stored somewhere where it will be inert for 10,000 years or so, lest it leak out and render large areas dangerously uninhabitable.
In the short term, the odds of major accident are low, especially given that technology has likely improved over time. However, over the long run, particularly considering constant financial pressures to low-ball maintenance and upkeep, some major oversight is more likely to happen given more plants. A few years ago, in my home state of Ohio, the Davis-Bessie nuclear power plant was found to be perilously close to a catastophic leak because of corrosion in some pipes that had been allowed to build up because of half-hearted inspections.
This sort of thing is always a possibility. Imagine a financial meltdown leading to serious economic pressures on a nuclear power plant… the inevitable pressures to cut corners will more likely lead to a meltdown of another kind. We can’t rule this out.
So, while I support nuclear power, I’d rather leapfrog over it as soon as possible.
Brad Hoehne
“It is stupid to put all your eggs into one basket called technology and hope you discover new technology that will bail you out.”
I agree that it is stupid to put all your eggs in one basket, but, right now, the vast majority of our eggs are in the fossil fuel basket.
Given that, with best estimates (given by oil companies themselves) drilling in ANWR is likely to garner us around 1 million barrels a day, intensive exploitation of tar sands and drilling off the coast of Florida will do about the same each- we’ll get something like an addition 3 million barrels a day from opening up these addition outlets.
We already produce 5 million or so barrels a day domestically- and we consume 20 million barrels. So, in the best case, we would go from importing roughly 75 percent of our oil, to importing 60 percent. A good step, yes, but hardly life changing. Drilling just staves off the inevitable time when we’ll have to switch over to another fuel because it reduces the market incentive to innovate. (Note, for instance, that people are buying fewer SUVs now, which will go as far to reduce the price of gas today as drilling in ANWR will.)
One doesn’t have to make the switch in “one week”, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Rome wasn’t built in day…
Brad H.
Regarding “Obama’s welfare for the masses is a giant step toward Dictatorship. “
I’m curious which specific policy proposals you regard as “welfare for the masses.” If you could pinpoint which statements trigger your alarm bells, than I could more easily address them.
Simply implying that Obama is a latent dictator cum marxist cum commie pinko liberal is an example of what I’ve informally been calling “poo-poohead” politics. Poo-poohead politics is demonizing a candidate by applying tags to them. Saying Obama is a bad guy because “he’s a liberal” is an example of poo-poohead politics, becuase it makes exactly as much sense to say “Obama is a bad guy because he’s a poo-poohead.” It’s unspecfic name calling.
I don’t doubt that there are interesting philosophical reasons to discuss.
Brad H.
Left or Right, both are nuts in the same sack.
One more thing…
The best case scenario assumes all oil exploration we do produces results TODAY. Any drilling we do will likely not show real marketable results until the better part of a decade from now. By that time we could have been well on our way to generating a good bulk of our power by other means. (NASA got us to the moon in about the same time…
Do you really have so little confidence in our ability to innovate? When China and India’s economies start slurping up more oil than us, wouldn’t it make a heck of a lot more sense for us to be in a position to move away from it? It’s a national security issue.
Market forces are powerful motivators. If oil stays at $130+ a barrel for a long time, we’re going to emerge a more efficient, and thus stronger economy. If we took temporary steps to reduce the price, the market motivation would vanish and people would likely revert to their old spendtrift ways.
Carter is often disparaged, but during his term- and those of his two predecessors- the oil shocks led to a huge increase in fuel efficiency- and we’re now importing a heck of a lot less oil than we would have otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis#Impact_on_U.S._motor_industry
Brad H.
Carter was a fool.
why is the US so resistant on Nuclear? Sure they are concerned about leakage, etc. But can’t they just ask the French and others what they do and do that.
Carter never should have killed off the breeder reactors. That was a huge mistake.
“Carter never should have killed off the breeder reactors. That was a huge mistake.”
It was actually congress that killed off the Clinch River Breeder in 1983, which was considered the prototype for the US breeder reactor program. The main reason given at the time was that it was not economically viable.
Breeder reactors, particularly liquid Flourine reactors, are a good idea today if they can be produced viably. They partially solve the safety issue.
Brad Hoehne
Obama is the candidate of change.
He is the unity candidate. He can tolerate many points of veiw which is why he stayed in Reverend Wright’s church for so many years. His limited time in the Senate means that he is untainted by Washington like more experienced candidates (ie McCain). He is only moderately patriotic which allows him to take a more world veiw getting us “in” with Europe. He will negotiate our misunderstandings with other people who hate us, not bomb them. He will provide top quality health care for everyone whether we can afford it or not. He will scrap the NAFTA treaty which is destroying American business. And finally we will stop global warming at the root unlike other candidates who strike at the branches. By drilling in the coasts we will only warm the planet, Obama will put an end to the oil economy period. Only with Obama an this country be led into the future. With McCain we will be continuing more of the same.
Vote Obama in November!!!
Anon of 5:18
Thanks for the info. However, let me put the quote:
“April 1977 President Jimmy Carter called for an indefinite deferral of construction of commercial breeder reactors.”
In context.
The quote was actually:
Because of international concern about proliferation, in April 1977 President Jimmy Carter called for an indefinite deferral of construction of commercial breeder reactors.[3]
Carter’s opposition was that breeder reactors leave one with a bunch of plutonium to dispose of. The best use for plutonium? Bombs. This has not changed.
Brad H.
brad…yeah, that just shows what a wuss Carter was. plenty of other ways to make/get bombs.
that is no reason to handicap the entire country on the energy policy.
so here we go again with worrying about “international concern about proliferation” when no one is doing anything about pakistan based actual proliferation not to mention all the issues with the former soviet union stock piles.
I allways use to say left and right principles can be put into practice in a good way or in a bad way. We can remember Sovietic Union as an example of extreme Left application and German Nazism as an example of extreme Right application. Both terrible and cause of imense suffering…however there is a difference…the ideology behing the Lef approach is based upon human values that every person can agree on while the ideology behind the right approach is in itsef evil. So in the doubt vote for left 🙂
Read Tom Friedman’s most recent column on our addiction to oil. Drilling for more oil is not solving our addiction. It’s like installing another pusher around the corner.
As for the analogy to Goichberg and the USCF. Goichberg is much more like McCain in that he has never really gotten the internet and/or has come to it way too late. It’s 2008 and when asked whether he preferred macs or pcs, McCain responded that he leaves those details to his wife. Meanwhile, Obama has smartly used the internet to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. If you want a chess personality, Obama is more of a Greg Shahade type and McCain and Goichberg are both dinosaurs from the last century. Sorry.
McCain has already come out in favor of Nuclear Electricity. We need it until we can come up with other solutions. We must stop buying oil from foreign countries. McCain has the better solutions. McCain also support all green solutions. He is more innovative. He came up with the idea of a prize for a new auto battery. McCain is much better than Obama trys to make him out to be. He is not another Bush.
“so here we go again with worrying about “international concern about proliferation” when no one is doing anything about pakistan based actual proliferation not to mention all the issues with the former soviet union stock piles.”
Well, then you’ll be happy to know that none other than Barak Obama is something of an expert on this, as he has made several official trips with Reublican Senator Richard Lugar to Eastern Europe to oversee the dismantling of old Soviet weapons systems- the kind of weapons systems that have a nasty tendency to end up in the hands of folks who don’t like us very much…
Here from the website of Lugar are some of the details.
http://lugar.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=278019
http://illinoischannel.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B0DB128F5CD96151!1856.entry
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/kankakee-il/TEJEHH26UIGBAPNF3
Note that this activity, and these articles, predate Obama’s candidacy by a good while.
Brad Hoehne
Regarding: “yeah, that just shows what a wuss Carter was. plenty of other ways to make/get bombs.
that is no reason to handicap the entire country on the energy policy.”
I find this kind of strange, considering that Carter was, himself, a Nuclear technician on a Nuclear Sub at one point.
There were plenty of reasons to oppose the Nuclear Power at the time. Not the least of which was that the technology was not as advanced at the time.
Here’s an article from the Heritage Foundation from 1982 explaining why a the Republican half of congress couldn’t sign off on the Clinch River project- the gist of which was that it was costing a fortune and getting nowhere. (Permit me a small dig here: This was back when the Replican party stood for fiscal discipline.)
http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/bg231.cfm
We might be able to better today, given the example that Europe has set on how to do it.
Brad Hoehne
Quick correction: Carter never actually served on a Nuclear Sub, he had nuclear training with the intent to work on such a sub, but after the Korean War, and sudden, premature, death of his father, he resigned his commission. He did take part in the cleanup of the Chalk River reactor. This may have influenced his views on Nuclear Power.
Brad H.