White House Explains Transport-Energy Future 358
blair1q writes "Today on the White House Blog, the President (ok, his staff) released an infographic showing various facts about transportation energy, and how current gas prices need not be so worrisome. Highlights include rapidly increasing domestic production and rapidly decreasing prices for electric-car batteries, requesting Congress to shift tax breaks from oil producers to wind/solar/geothermal energy producers, and increasing domestic oil production (yes, there's a conflict there)."
Re:Um... It is about EROEI (Score:4, Interesting)
Good. Consider it a jobs program. The benefits of efficiency accrue only to the wealthy anyway, so what should the rest of us care?
Re:Restrict oil speculation (Score:4, Interesting)
I read it in a Slashdot comment.
Is your source more reliable than that?
(A company like Southwest Airlines is a huge oil speculator, they spend money today to make sure that a certain amount of their future supply is available at a predictable price. Is the benefit Southwest gets from that activity really such an evil thing?)
Re:Domestic production? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
134 billion barrels known, just requires more work/legislation to get at some of it. So 18 years. Still, your children would get to experience a Mad-Max style collapse of civilization.
Well, with the increase of production, oil prices would drop substantially. With lower oil prices, we could tax imported oil by the barrel and still have us paying less at the pump. Take the money you make from taxing imported oil by the barrel and invest that money into "green energy" research. With that much money invested, we will either find a cheap, sustainable energy source or it there's not one to be found and we're all screwed anyway.
*Note: The reason you tax imported oil only is to spur domestic production and offer some protection to those who are bit nervous about drilling. See, many years ago, the price of oil tanked (see what I did there?). It was so low, it actually cost more to pump it out of the ground than it was worth. Many wells were permanently capped off and investors lost their shirts. Investors have long memories and are still reluctant to drill for the hard to get at oil. Taxing imports will force a minimum price that will give investors some confidence to go ahead and drill without fear of prices dropping below their break even point.
This entire graph is built on a series of lies (Score:3, Interesting)
First, we already know from various scientific papers, that you can use wind energy to provide power for full scale freight trains in Canada, using fuel cell engines, and do so while reducing both carbon emissions and particulate pollution. Economies of scale kick in, you just split the H20 into fuel cell engine components at the wind farms along the route, which also allows you to handle the variable nature of wind.
Second, it supposes that our insane blockade of Cuba and other countries cane ethanol will continue, and that we will continue to divert corn food/feed crops to ethanol with massive farm and energy subsidies that are unsustainable - the most anti-capitalist thing we could be doing.
Third, it assumes that our country won't shift from using mostly air travel (high energy) to rail travel along the dense urban corridors in the East, South, and West. It also ignores Boeing's and SA's and Airbus higher mpg planes and jets and the use of turboprops and algae/switchgrass biodiesel to get twice the air miles using mostly alternative non-oil-based jet and turboprop fuels.
It is an insane plan written by deadenders who fail to understand that the world has already changed, and that all our exports and imports already have a carbon tax imposed on them - when we sell to NZ, Australia, Canada, Mexico, South America, and the EU we get charged for our lack of a carbon tax and end up paying a higher amount of taxes on the exports - and the imports already have a carbon tax built into them, which we don't get a refund for, since we lack a carbon tax.
EPIC FAIL.
Re:Lower Taxes & Cut Regulations. Poison the E (Score:4, Interesting)
If Obama's energy strategy doesn't involve tax handouts to the oil companies and shortsighted environmental rules then I don't support it.
Of course, I'm retarded so I was probably going to vote for a Republican anyway...
The retards (or if you want to be polite, the misled) are the ones who keep supporting this Democrat-Republican duopoly that's gotten us nowhere, eroded liberty, and steadily run the nation into the ground for the last several decades. They don't even pretend to be our servants anymore.
Granted, it's a masterpiece of social engineering because it exploits a few simple principles without trying to be overly elaborate. It's classic divide-and-conquer: get the voters bickering over relatively trivial issues, each "side" thinking the other "side" is a bunch of morons who don't understand the facts, meanwhile all of the important decisions are made by the corporatocracy which can afford media campaigns, lobbyists, and real representation. It exploits the baser facets of human nature that date back to our hunter-gatherer days: members of my group good, outsiders bad, us against them. Isn't it funny how the status quo never really changes, it just becomes more so, just moves farther down the path it's already on? This is why.
Here's the failure of basing an educational system on memorization and authority instead of principle and discovery: most people would recognize why a duopoly with a stranglehold on an entire market is undesirable, why it guarantees that customers get screwed. Those same people need to have it pointed out to them that a duopoly with a strangehold on the entire political process is worse, that with money and power the stakes are higher than with money alone, that the voters get screwed quite badly.
Re:Lower Taxes & Cut Regulations. Poison the E (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, I'm retarded so I was probably going to vote for a Republican anyway...
Why are such childish arguments usually made by those attacking Republicans? I wonder if it's simply the age disparity; kids tend to be liberal, adults conservative.
Re:Is there anything in there about suburbs? (Score:1, Interesting)
I am a bit tired of making the same point, that it is government taxes and subsidies that destroy the economy, but this is the correct story for it and your comment is a good way to enter the discussion.
Taxes destroy infrastructure. [slashdot.org]
Infrastructure suffers due to government involvement. Imagine if there was no FDR, the recession of 1929 could go the route of the recession of 1921 and there would be no public projects and no Great Depression (which is not going to seem so great once the current one really hits with the debt and currency crisis). Imagine the federal government did not build the highway system, did not tax the airlines and did not destroy profitable private rail while laying down the roads.
There would be no subsidies to the auto industry in form of the roads, there would be much fewer people relying on personal cars for transportation. Trains and air travel would dominate and within cities there would be healthy market for profitable private transportation as well.
There would be no suburban sprawl. People would drive to work for 2 hours, they wouldn't waste those 2 hours on the road. There would be many fewer accidents and deaths and much less illness associated with sedentary life style. People and places would be within walking distance, the infrastructure would be actually sustainable without government subsidies.
The oil would not be needed in such enormous quantities. There would be much less possibility of a housing crisis, and the newly built areas would have to also build the necessary infrastructure for easy public access via rail/air/bus/etc/cab/etc.
There would be much less need for oil, so foreign policy could be much more relaxed and there could be much fewer conflicts with and within the oil rich nations.
The pollution could be much lower than it is today.
There are all these obvious benefits to NOT having government in doing business and designing and building the infrastructure if only the government could let go of the money and power that these projects bring with themselves..... but they cannot.
The highway system gives the government huge leverage against States and municipalities, allows them to dictate their local policies and politics. There are all these oil and other companies that come to the government with all this money... No way a politician could ever resist.
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As to all this nonsense about oil making huge profits and 'not paying fair share' - lets see. Per Exxon site:
Less than 3 percent of ExxonMobilâ(TM)s earnings are from U.S. gasoline sales [exxonmobil...ctives.com]
ExxonMobilâ(TM)s earnings are from operations in more than 100 countries around the world. The part of the business that refines and sells gasoline and diesel in the United States represents less than 3 percent â" or 3 cents on the dollar â" of our total earnings. For every gallon of gasoline, diesel or finished products we manufactured and sold in the United States in the last three months of 2010, we earned a little more than 2 cents per gallon. Thatâ(TM)s not a typo. Two cents.
So on their US business, Exxon makes 2 cents per gallon. Do you know how much the government of USA makes on each gallon? 48 cents. NO WAY a government would give up such a lucrative racket, and all it took was to build a bunch of public unsustainable subsidized highways with all these other perks - like leverage against States, and all of this is done by taxing somebody else via direct taxes as well as indirect inflation tax, which hits anybody actually owning / earning US dollars, as with every new printed dollar, the value of all dollars go down. That's why it was important for the US government to get off the gold standard, they could not print it.
But did the public really get something good for it? Well, clearly, somebody got s
Smart to Import Oil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anybody believe this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone modded this down to -1 but honestly, I'd like an answer to this question myself. It really is a simple question. It's also a legitimate question. Answering a legitimate question would be much more respectable than modding it down and hoping it goes away like an insecure person. So, is anyone of the Progressive persuasion willing to put numbers to this?
It was posted AC. They are guilty until proven innocent as far as trolling is concerned.
What I want is for someone who truly believes in Progressivism to attempt a real answer at this question, even if you sincerely feel that no politician is adequately representing your position: at what point would you be satisfied and feel that you have gotten everything you wanted with regard to the tax code?
I believe in income redistribution when it comes to the tax code. Let me get that out right up front. Globalization has been very good to the United States. I have not seen any economists argue that we should have or should now economically isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. But, the middle class and lower class has not benefited from Globalization. All the money and power has gone to the Upper-Middle and Upper classes. That is why income inequality is so high in this country. In the 60s and 70s, the difference between a CEO salary and the average worker salary was something like 20:1 or 30:1. Now it is somewhere around 300:1. They are getting most of the benefits from our system of government. Why should they not shoulder the higher tax burden?
My view of the "American Dream" is that it should not matter where you start in life. If you are the best, smartest, and hardest working then you should be able to become one of the richest. And you can measure this by measuring Intergenerational Mobility [wikipedia.org]. And you find that the US ranks pretty low on the list. If you are rich in the US, then your descendants probably will be as well, no matter how stupid or lazy they are.
The tax system that I would theoretically like to have (though would have no idea the best way to actually implement it) would be one that aims to have a income distribution in the population (most likely would be a poisson distribution). If the rich are getting richer, and the middle class is getting left behind, then the rich should be taxed more (relatively). If there are not enough poor people, then the middle class should be taxed more (relatively). I am leaving out of the discussion how much taxes we should aim to collect. I am positing a system that stays revenue neutral. Now, I still want poor people. I think that we should build in opportunities for them to make something of themselves, but I still want people to be motivated to work knowing that if they don't their life will be uncomfortable. But, I also want the working man to have the incentive to work real hard, knowing that a few rich families at the top do not have a monopoly on real wealth. I do not want to assign an arbitrary tax percentage that is "enough". It is enough when it makes this a better country.
Also, I want to correct the previous post. The 40% do not "not only pay no taxes but actually get credits". They get a credit on their federal income taxes. They still pay FICA taxes (medicare and social security) which account for 15% if you count what the employer has to "match". They also pay sales taxes, possible state income taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, and whatever other taxes there are. I would also like to point out that those taxes tend to be regressive taxes. So, as a percentage of income, the middle class and below pays a much higher amount of tax than the upper class does.
I hope that was the kind of response you were asking for.