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15 Comments

1. eliana:

   Listen, anybody who’s against offshore drilling clearly hasn’t thought of the countless problems that it would solve. For example,
   Problem: pollutants increase nationwide. Your kid has asthma attacks on a daily basis. On “bad air days” he can’t go outside.
   Solution: You’re going to need some cheap fuel to drive him back and forth to the hospital. Try drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. Also, you should gut the clean air regulations. Actually, you have enough to worry about. Let us do it for you.
   See more reasons why offshore drilling will save the world: http://www.236.com/news/2008/07/30/poor_depressed_impotent_offsho_8035.php

2. jim:

   As usual, Jim’s logic is flawed. Obama’s idea of alternative energy is pie in the sky “won’t help us lower prices now” thinking. Two , global demand for oil has pushed prices up to $125 a barrel, not lack of controls on hedge buying, i.e. American Airlines buying oil futures for August and Sept to control their costs.
   Get real Jim. American automakers wanted to increase mpg in 2002, but democrats like Carl Levin and Rep Dingell blocked those federal rules on c.a.f.e. Now we have liberal democrats driving gas guzzlers while sipping their lattees. ps Haliburton is an international co. which assists oil companies in producing more oil for those democrats to put into their suvs. 48000 Americans hold stock in Hal.

3. Christopher Thomas:

   Les:

   Who has claimed that increasing drilling will be a quick fix? The logical thing to assume is that it will take about three years before incrasing supply will begin to have an impact. But this sounds like a terrific deal when comapred to the socialistic promises of Obama. Today he mentioned siezing oil profits to give everyone a $1000 rebate. A windfall tax. We should all be leary when government wants to suddenly change the rules of the game after the starting bell. This is the very reason you are so frightened of the Bush administration to begin with–you believe (wrongly) that Bush is changing the rules dangerously. If a government wants to annonce a new set of rules, they should let the old rules be retired formally. Did our forefathers really want a government which could intrude so drastically?

   But the real problem with Obama (a man with significantly less political and leadership experience than Gwen More) is that he has no plan at all. He talks about fast-tracking energy saving technologies, but that is meaningless dribble. Profit is what fast-tracks technology, government can usually only stifle it.

   You mention the new techology from AFS Trinity, and it certainly sounds promising. I find it hard to imagine the GM–given its well-known financial problems–wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to put a strong competitor up against the Honda and Toyota hybrids. But not all of us can afford the sharp price of those hybrid cars, not now. When some company can bring the new technology forward with the right proce government will not need to do a thing. Change will be automatic if you let people make choices acording to their self-interest.

   But again, one must ask what other technologies are under development. As consumers, we don’t know that there is anything on the horizon. That is why new drilling is essential. I’m sure you’ll also note that the recent fall in oil prices coinsided with the announcement that we would look at increasing our production.

4. Les Nakamoto:

   Christopher,

   It has been McCain who has been putting offshore drilling on the front burner, in response to people asking for some help in quickly reducing gas prices.

   He’s jumped on the bandwagon with Bush in support of his reversing the offshore oil drilling ban. (Not coincidentally, McCain was against offshore drilling until he recently received a huge influx of money to his campaign by the oil industry which was lobbying for offshore drilling.)

   Bush has also claimed that offshore drilling would help provide a reduction in gas prices. His action in reversing the ban on offshore drilling was also in response to the public asking our government to do something about high gas prices. His public relations people have been a little more cautious by saying that it would take more time and wouldn’t have as much effect on the prices.

   That has been all over the news for the past month or so.

   As you stated, the logical thing to assume is that it will take about three years before increasing supply will begin to have an impact, (assuming of course, that that oil is actually being used here in this country). However, Bush’s own Energy Department is saying you won’t see a drop of oil for seven years.

   Republicans are claiming that that will happen much sooner than that. However, in demanding that oil be drilled in ANWR to help us with our oil supplies to reduce prices, even Rep. Sensenbrenner acknowledged several years ago that the oil pumped out of ANWR wouldn’t even be used anywhere east of the Mississippi, and would probably be shipped to Southeast Asia instead, because the oil companies don’t owe any allegiances to the United States and can make more money if they sell the oil to a different country.

   You claim that Obama is creating a new set of rules (by proposing that the excessive profits that the oil companies have been taking in, be used to help people with their heating oil bills, in the amount of $1000 for each family struggling with their bills). Actually, this isn’t a new set of rules at all. The concept of windfall profit taxes has been around for awhile, and laws against monopolies have been around for much longer than that. And these laws have been in place to prevent companies from taking unfair advantage of their consumers. Bush and his administration have done everything they could to reverse those laws to make them favor the corporations.

   The problem with windfall profit taxes that were tried in the 1980’s is that when oil companies were charged for them, they played dirty by producing less oil and charging more.

   So, if we really want to do something about this, we really need to get off of the oil standard and move to other technologies.

   The fact that the big six oil companies in the United States have reported a record $51.5 Billion Profit in this quarter demonstrates that this isn’t about profits that are necessary for a company to function, nor are they fair profits. These are about profits gained just as when Enron was gouging excessive profits out of its customers. This is particularly true when one considers that this record $51.5 Billion profit is an increase in profits by 40% over last quarter’s record profits.

   I’ve posted the link to the article which reported the above facts, below, because if you attempt to Google record oil profits, it is hard to find the article among the many that report record oil profits for oil companies going back to 2003.

   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25964073/

   Exxon was reported to hold 6 of the 10 record high profit reports.

   So, my guess is that you would be in the minority if you believe that the price gouging that the oil companies are doing to the American public is somehow sacrosanct as Capitalistic Gospel.

   You claim that Obama can’t succeed with his plans because he is attempting to fast track technological development. You believe that only profit would fast track technological development and that Government stifles it.

   If you are talking about Republican government stifling technological development, I would agree with you that that is the case. However, the Carter Administration was able to push through fuel mileage mandates on the automotive industry in 1977 after the oil crises caused by the OPEC embargo. That was promptly reversed by President Reagan and the first President Bush, and the Republicans in Congress have prevented it from passing ever since.

   Republicans have been in control of the White House for 20 of the last 28 years, and Congress for 12 of the last 14 years, so if you want to blame anyone for not doing anything to improve our energy independence, and government is your culprit, at least now everyone knows who to blame.

   However, most experts believe that the only way that you can fast track technological development is if a well organized and focused government pushes it through and helps finance it. That was true of NASA putting a man on the moon after John F. Kennedy first made it a goal, and it was true when government had to fast track the development and construction by industry to ramp up for WWII. Nothing short of government or a company with the financial wherewithal of the government can accomplish that. If you don’t have the investment available to make it happen, it won’t matter what the profit is. You simply won’t get it done.

   And going into a diatribe regarding reducing taxes to spur economic growth just doesn’t wash either. We had higher taxes under President Clinton and more growth with higher employment and a robust economy. We have lower taxes under Bush and much less growth (if any), and lower employment, with a struggling economy.

   You say that you find it hard to imagine that GM wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to put a strong competitor up against the Honda and Toyota hybrids. But the fact is that they haven’t jumped. They haven’t even shown a mild interest. I posted the link to the article that quoted the AFS Trinity CEO, in my first post on this subject above. If you disagree with GM’s lack of action on this, you should call them and complain about it. But this isn’t the first time that GM hasn’t shown any interest. You should recall that after the 1970’s OPEC oil embargo, some automobile companies decided to focus on smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles. Those companies were overseas. GM, Ford and Chrysler weren’t very interested. They instead focused on taking the fuel efficiencies that they gained (by the research mandated by the Carter Administration), and putting that into more powerful trucks. Those trucks are now sitting in dealers’ lots begging to be bought, or are being shipped to China, where people who have money from the jobs that used to be here in the U.S. can afford to buy them (and put fuel in them).

   And while you say that most people can’t afford the new hybrid technology and that change will be automatic when it is in the peoples’ best interest – neither of those arguments is necessarily accurate either.

   First of all, if people are buying an average priced car that get only 20 mpg, because they can afford the monthly payments of a car priced $20,000 or less, but still drive 15,000 miles or more per year, are paying not only the monthly payments of $200-$300 or more, but also paying $3000 a year on gas. But most people buy based on looks, not on fuel economy, or at least that was most important until the gas prices hit $4 a gallon.

   If people buy a Prius, that gets more than 50 mpg, they would have to pay more in monthly payments because of its higher price. But until April of this year, you could still get a basic model for about $22,000 less a manufacturer’s incentive of $600, and some dealers were offering discounts. Costco was also offering $1100 discounts if you were a Costco member. Annual gas cost would be about $1200. So not only could you get the car for the same price as a 20 mpg gas guzzler, but you would be saving $1800 annually on fuel.

   Since gas prices have soared, demand for the Prius has gone through the roof and they now have about a three month waiting list. Dealer discounts, manufacturer’s discounts and other incentives have all but disappeared, so you will be paying several thousand dollars more than you would have back in April. But this scenario is a repeat of what happened in the late 1970’s. People bought more fuel efficient vehicles for a short time, until they were led to believe that fuel availability wasn’t an issue. That’s when they started buying the gas guzzlers that the auto manufacturers made a bigger profit on. But GM lost over $15 Billion last quarter for betting on selling big SUVs and Trucks and not ramping up for fuel efficient hybrids because they had squandered the last thirty years opportunity to develop.

   Had auto manufacturers started building higher fuel efficiency vehicles in the 1970’s and built on that technology, we might be in a position to compete with the Honda’s and the Toyota’s, but the auto manufacturers squandered that opportunity. Since competition leads to reduced prices to get your business, the high prices that you claim make hybrids out of reach, wouldn’t be a problem today, if the American manufacturers had acted sooner. Now they are playing catch up, and if they don’t act fast, they won’t just lose, they will go belly up.

   We got our Prius in March and were still able to take advantage of many of the discounts that were available then. (About $3500 worth.) If the price of gas continues to go down in the short run, then there may be another lessening of pressure from people waiting in line to get one, but even if there is, I don’t believe it will last for long.

   Toyota has released some advance information on their new model Prius coming out in 2009 or 2010, which is basically the same, except that it has a high quality capacitor and a plug in capacity, just like AFS Trinity’s. The difference is that Toyota’s will get about 100 mpg, and is well on the way to mass production. AFS Trinity can’t get the support of the auto manufacturers to get it built even though it can get 150 mpg. That’s why it takes government to step in and mandate that it be built. Once it is built and starts to compete with Toyota, prices for both vehicles will come down. But as long as Toyota is the only game in town, they can get whatever price they want for it.

   And in spite of the price, last year Toyota sold a record 180,000 Priuses in the U.S. in 2007. The original model has been out for almost a decade. In March of this year they sold 20,000 and have been increasing their sales ever since.

   People are acting in their best interest when they understand what that is and how they can go about doing what they need to do to help themselves. If they don’t know how, or don’t have the tools to do so, they won’t, or can’t act. And as long as the oil companies and automobile companies are blurring the issues by intentionally putting out bad information, that also hurts their ability to make well informed decisions.

   You claim that we don’t know what is on the horizon, yet in reality, we have much more information available to us than you would have the readers believe.

   Electric cars have been a reality for decades, but were destroyed by the automobile industry when they realized that they lasted much longer than gas or diesel vehicles and required fewer repairs, thus less profit for them. Hybrid Diesel Electric trains have been around for forty years. The jump from hybrid trains, to hybrid trucks or cars wasn’t a big step to take at all. The problem was that Detroit refused to take that step.

   The plug in capacity of an electric car would cost the consumer only about $1 a day for the average driver to recharge their cars for forty miles range. That would require an overhaul of our electrical grid, primarily by increasing their capacity to produce energy. But that has already been shown to be not only do-able, but profitable by building wind turbines, which are producing electricity for the people and businesses that have switched to them, and have even created more electricity than they needed so that they could sell the surplus to the electric company. We have the ability to produce 20% of our electricity from renewable and nearly free wind power, within the next ten years. That would drastically reduce our coal usage and the need to build nuclear power plants, while producing clean power.

   This renewable, non-polluting technology has been around for decades, but hadn’t been put into large scale use, except for in our desert southwest. It has only recently been expanded off of I-41 in Wisconsin after many years of tests.

   You claim that we have to drill to get more oil in order to reduce prices, but what Bush did was only to lift the offshore oil drilling ban. He didn’t increase the amount of oil available. And the oil companies have had access to 68 million acres of real estate to drill in, in this country, even before Bush lifted the ban. But they have refused to drill in that acreage. So even with Bush’s lift on the ban, it is unlikely that oil companies will significantly increase the production of oil in this country. They’ve been slowing down on the production of oil in the U.S. since the 1970’s.

   And with the increasing problems with global warming, non-polluting, renewable energy sources are what we should be concentrating on.

   We have the technology to grow bio fuel algae that can produce 100,000 gallons per acre per year, versus the 20 gallons of ethanol that we can get from corn per acre per year.

   So, in an area one tenth the size of New Mexico, we could produce enough bio fuel to eliminate the need for oil imports entirely. An additional benefit to this would be that rather than putting more CO2 into the air, all of the CO2 from the renewable bio fuel is taken up by the algae when it is growing, so the annual output of that CO2 is a net ZERO, rather than increasing the CO2 in the air, by billions of tons, like using fossil fuels would do.

   Time Magazine reported on this on March 24, 2008 when they interviewed Glen Kertz, principal scientist for Vertigro Energy.

   You ended your comments by saying that “I’m sure you’ll also note that the recent fall in oil prices coinsided with the announcement that we would look at increasing our production.” (your spelling, not mine)

   Thank you for agreeing with me.

   The oil prices didn’t fall because of an ACTUAL increase in oil production, but only on the SPECULATION that more oil would be made available. It was the SPECULATORS in the oil market that were driving up the oil prices. It had nothing to do with real costs. So while the SPECULATORS were making a killing as oil increased in value ON PAPER, average Americans were being scalped. That was the primary reason that oil hit $147 a barrel on July 11 (even though Republicans who have been profiting by those speculations have been denying that that is the case).

   But because of the threat of increased drilling (not actual drilling or supplying the U.S. with actual oil), the price of oil has dropped. So actually drilling for or getting more oil had very little to do with this price drop.

   Today, August 6, 2008, oil dropped to less than $119 a barrel, on news that we have excess inventories!

   And why do we have excess inventories? Perhaps because the price of gas is so high that most people have had to cut back on their driving and have used less gas as a result. That by itself would only have a few percentage points effect on the total use of the fuel that we have, (which is about how much we would save if people actually made sure that their tires were properly inflated – something Republicans have also ridiculed, but which has been verified by many scientists, Auto Clubs and NASCAR).

   So how much do you think the price of gas would drop if we were all driving cars that were hybrids that got 50 mpg or better?

   We import about 70% of the oil we use. Getting an average increase to 50 mpg or more for all passenger cars would cause a reduction in the amount of fuel we used annually by about 60%. That alone would almost entirely eliminate our need for foreign oil, and for that reason alone, it should be done.

   I’d say that getting us all into hybrids that get 50 mpg or better should be fast tracked and mandated and shouldn’t be left to the manufacturers who have been dragging their feet on this for the last thirty years.

5. Bill Stocks:

   Mr. Nakamoto – I am employed with a local company that makes brakes. These brakes go on the off-shore oil rigs and keep about 250 of us in this company employed. The companies we use to supply parts and service to help us manufacture the brakes equal about 16 (12 of who are local owned companies, and all together totalling more than 16,000 employees.) Now that may not seem like a lot in the big scheme of things, but if you halt the making of these oil rigs, the damage to the employment rate would be devastating (not just in Milwaukee). Also as less fuel is being provided (regardless of hybrids or not, the cost will actually escelate even greater (supply and demand). I, for one, don’t want to pay high gas prices, regardless of what kind of car I drive, and most Americans don’t. But it is what it is. At this moment in time, it appears fuel makes the world go around.

6. Deputy Insider:

   Mr. Stocks, Bill, I can’t wait to get into a Hybrid. Mostly because, as you say, you might lose your job.

7. Bill Stocks:

   That was uncalled for DI………….

8. Deputy Insider:

   aw Bill come now, where that wonderful sense of humor you claim to have? Sucks when people don’t care about YOUR job huh? Oh well.

9. Christopher Thomas:

   Les:

   After talking to several other hybrid owners, I think you’ll have to admit that the prius favored by you elitist socialist types rarely gets 50 miles per gallon–even with correct tire inflation.

   Here’s an idea: why not allow people to choose to do what they want. Since I’m not a rich, elite lefty like yourself, I’ll stick with my old beater. And let the prople who want to drive SUV’s drive theirs. I’m against a government that wants to tell people what to drive–or imprison them on public transportation systems they control.

   “Mandate” is a nice word for stripping someone of the freedom of choice.

10. Les Nakamoto:

    Bill,

    I’m not against drilling for oil, but I do think that there is a downside to it if you are drilling/pumping out and burning more than what the earth can comfortably handle in regards to the excess CO2 that is being released into the atmosphere.

    If you’re going to do it, it should be regulated so that we can make sure that we have those resources well into the future. If we burn it all up with 20 mpg vehicles today, we won’t have any fuel left to use in the 100 and 150 mpg vehicles that are almost ready for mass production now.

    Global warming is not in question any more, other than by those who profit by contesting the facts. Exxon pays $10,000 to high profile professionals who speak out against Global Warming as a reality. I would think that the facts would speak for themselves and people wouldn’t have to be bribed to present their point of view.

    As for your job making brakes for oil rigs. I don’t harbor any resentment towards you or your job, but I do think that we could be much more productive by making hybrids that use less fuel. There have been many more jobs lost in the automotive industry because the manufacturers haven’t made products that are fuel efficient, and customers can’t afford the fuel that you require to continue the demand to build more oil rigs for your job. Your job will eventually disappear when there is less and less demand for oil. More and more people recognize the need for alternative energy sources, and the new technology will create more jobs that pay much more than the old oil technology, and without creating the high levels of pollution either.

    But, in the meantime, as long oil companies keep putting oil rigs in hurricane alley, where they can be destroyed by the global warming that the excessive use of fossil fuels is creating, you’ll still be able to make replacement parts.

    You might be forced out of your home if you get flooded, or a tornado destroys it because of global warming, but you can still make parts.

    On the other hand, there are 80 million cars manufactured every year. As long as manufacturers make cars that only get 20 mpg, they won’t be able to sell many. On the other hand, if they make them all to go 150 mpg, I think they could probably bring the cost per unit down and keep selling them like there is no tomorrow. Don’t you think there is more upside profit potential to make brakes for 80 million hybrids rather than for a few hundred oil rigs?

11. Les Nakamoto:

    Christopher

    Once again, you come through with the spin.

    You say you’ve talked with several other hybrid owners, and based on your extensive research, you’ve determined that it isn’t possible to get 50 mpg or more out of a Prius.

    You may want to expand your horizons (and your research group), so you can get the real facts. The U.S. Government has indicated that their tests show that they can get 60 mpg on a Prius. That’s right – Six Zero. That doesn’t mean you’re going to get it all the time, but it is possible. On the other hand, with a few driving lessons, you can learn to drive a Prius to get over 50 mpg without much difficulty at all. And you can do that on a regular basis, without trying very hard either. Just because a few of your friends haven’t figured out how, doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible. (Another one of your errors in logic.)

    There is a Milwaukee Hybrid Group that teaches people how to drive hybrids so they can get the most mileage out of their vehicles, and over 50 mpg isn’t uncommon. You might want to let your friends in on the secret so they learn how to get better mileage on theirs. In addition, there are hypermilers, who have been able to drive regular cars, with no hybrid technology at all, and get double or better the mileage that the manufacturer has rated them for. There is no high tech secret to that, you just need to learn a different way to drive.

    You claim that you aren’t a “rich, elite lefty” like me, so you’ll stick with your old beater. You say that you want to let people who want to drive SUV’s drive theirs’, and that you are “against a government that wants to tell people what to drive – or imprison them on public transportation systems they control.”

    You can do what you want. Most of the people that I know who have switched over to hybrids, love their cars and can’t get over how much money they are saving by driving them. I recently spoke to one who told me that someone he knew sold his 1991 Prius with over 350,000 miles on it, for $4,500. Not bad resale for something with 350,000 miles on it. I don’t know of too many other vehicles out there that are 7 years old with that kind of mileage that can get that kind of money for it. But you just keep driving your clunkers with bad mileage and poor resale. Somebody has to buy the junk that no one wants anymore.

    Anyone who wants to drive a big gas guzzling SUV is free to do so as well, until they get tired of filling up at a couple hundred dollars a pop, or get so broke that they can’t afford them anymore. Anywhere you go these days, you see big SUVs and RVs on the side of the road with For Sale signs on them, so I guess that the urge to buy them and drive them until they bankrupt you isn’t quite as appealing as it once was.

    Driving a vehicle that saves me 60% on my fuel costs isn’t imprisoning me. It frees me to be able to make trips that would be too costly to make otherwise.

    The mandate to build the hybrids isn’t to force people like you to buy them, or even drive them. It is to force manufacturers to make them available to people who want to drive cleaner, safer, more fuel efficient vehicles, so they don’t have to unnecessarily spend thousands of dollars for fuel every year, and pollute the air more than necessary either. In ten years, I’ll have saved enough money in fuel costs to pay for the car, and still have the car to sell used to someone else. (Even if I don’t keep it for ten years, I still have a great trade in.) How many other cars do you know of that can pay for themselves? The old technology, fuel inefficient vehicles will still be around for another 20 years or so, for anyone who still wants to buy them, but that market will dry up pretty fast.

    And creating public transportation systems that reduce traffic congestion, and the excess amount of fuel that is wasted because so many people are stuck in traffic going nowhere, isn’t to imprison people, but to give them a cheap alternative without the hassle of being stuck in traffic with people who like wasting their fuel going nowhere.

    Oil companies may have reduced their prices for the short term because they ended up stuck with too much oil and no market to sell it to. It was reported today that there is an 800,000 barrel a day surplus of oil because people just aren’t using as much. But don’t expect that to last too long. Europe, Asia and India have the cars, the jobs, and the money to be able to afford the gas, even though their prices are more than double what we pay. So when the oil companies decide that they can make more money by selling it to them, rather than keeping it cheap here at home, you’d better hope you have a plan B in place.

    You should be ecstatic about these proposals. They save fuel so that people like you who drive beaters and gas guzzlers can continue to drive them without having to pay as much as you would if you were competing with all of these other people for the dwindling available oil. I’ve reduced my fuel consumption by 60% and am quite happy to be able to spend that money elsewhere, rather than giving it to the oil companies.

    In ten years or so, when the world population doubles again, people aren’t going to be thinking they were being stripped of their freedoms because someone came up with a realistic, rational idea to conserve our resources so that we don’t end up going the way of the Dodo bird.

    Right now, there is about a three month waiting period to get a Prius, and there probably are, similar waiting periods for other high mpg hybrids as well.

    I’m very thankful that there are people like you who don’t want them, because that just means the waiting periods aren’t as long, the lack of extremely high demand helps keep the prices low, and someone else is giving their hard earned cash to buy technology that is outdated, and buying fuel that they wouldn’t have had to buy if they would have planned ahead and recognized the future when they saw it. It gives people who want to make the switch to hybrids an opportunity to still get a reasonable price for their old vehicles. (Kind of like trading in your old Windows 95 model for a reliable Windows XP model – note that I didn’t promote Vista).

    That’s your choice. Or was that something that the Oil Companies and auto manufacturers mandated for you?

12. Bill Stocks:

    Touche – DI. I just feel that regardless of how many of us own Hybrids and go the the gas station less, the prices will still continue to be high.

13. Bill Stocks:

    FYI – We also make brakes for GE on the windmills, so I am sure that market will continue to grow.

14. Deputy Insider:

    Bill, a switch to hybrids (most right now are gas/electric combos) really doesn’t save a thing. It’s a switch to fuel cells and zero dependency on gas that will make the biggest impact. Fuel cells aren’t the best quality YET. Even so I,for once, agree with you, the price of gas will not falter to well after a major shift to fuel cells. The new Honda Civic Hybrid claims 50 mpg, topping the Prius. Phoenix Motors produces a truck and suv that are fuel cell/electric and are AFFORDABLE. When unknown car makers from Arizona tops GM, Ford and Dodge, you can almost sense the reluctance of the top makers to dive whole heartedly into the Hybrid arena.

15. Les Nakamoto:

    Hybrids may not be THE answer, but they can be a significant part of the answer NOW. Given that we don’t have fuel cell technology or zero dependency on gas at the current time, it is a great first step.

    80 million cars are built every year. Only a tiny fraction of those cars are hybrids, and an even smaller fraction of the total existing cars are hybrids.

    28 million tons of CO2 would be reduced annually if only 10% of all cars on the road were converted to hybrid.

    What if they all were?

    What if they all were ELECTRIC ONLY?

    So, what if the car manufacturers would actually start building more, if not all of their cars as hybrids, instead of creating even more gas guzzlers?

    Ideally, I’d love to see all electric, plug ins that get the same range as gasoline or diesel powered vehicles, but until the batteries get smaller, lighter and hold more charge, that isn’t going to happen soon.

    However, Wired Magazine (Sept 2008) just published a story about a software engineer(with a lot of money backing him) who is approaching this problem a little differently, by creating networks in small countries, so you have the option of either plugging in your electric car to recharge it, or have their company just swap out the batteries for fully charged ones, for less than what it would cost you to operate a gas vehicle. It is not in place yet, but GM is interested in the concept, and it looks like a few small countries (Israel and Denmark) have signed on to develop it into a reality. So why is GM finally interested in electric cars when they dumped them before? Because they are losing market share to companies that build cars that are cheaper to operate.

    In the meantime, ANY technology, that allows us to conserve fuel and reduce our dependence on foreign oil reduces the $700 Billion that we are transferring to foreign countries for oil annually, and makes any major technology that much more feasible.

    None of them can replace the 70% of the fuel that we currently import, by themselves, but if you actually start building and using the ones (plural, as in as many as are feasible) that are attainable NOW, we can put ourselves into a position that is easier to accomplish much faster.

    A 60% savings from 20 mpg vehicles to 50 mpg vehicles (even if you only consider 50% as the amount of our total fuel usage as being used in vehicles), saves you at least 30% of our total fuel usage, which is almost half of what we currently import.

    And even simple things, like changing your driving habits can significantly affect your gas mileage. Bob Sikorsky’s “The Power of Green Driving” is considered “THE” book on getting the best mileage out of what you have. For example, driving 70 mph gives you only 2/3rds the gas mileage you get if you were driving 45 mph. And most drivers have jack rabbit starts off of green lights and keep their feet on the accelerator until just before they get to a red light. Taking slower, easy accelerations off of green lights and anticipating red lights, by taking your foot off of the accelerator and coasting to the red light with the momentum you already have, saves you fuel that would otherwise have been wasted. It also saves wear and tear on your brakes and tires.

    Some people drive with one foot on the brake pedal, reducing their mileage, when moving. Others drive with one foot on the accelerator when they are at a stop. Both practices cause unnecessary wear and waste fuel.

    The race car drivers that win the most, don’t do it by wasting fuel even when they drive fast. They have to conserve fuel to get the best mileage out of their vehicles, so they don’t have to take a pit stop to refuel, which can sometimes cost them the race. Learning to use the car’s momentum and a downhill grade, so that use can coast without putting too much pressure on the gas, can give you the best mileage – up to 100 mpg.

    And, yes, even making sure that your tires are properly inflated, can make a big difference, not just in your mileage and the safe performance of your vehicle, but in the total amount of fuel not used unnecessarily throughout the country.

    Any gallon of fuel we haven’t burned off wastefully, is another gallon we don’t need to import.

    Incorporating any of those suggestions, even in a car that isn’t a hybrid, can significantly improve your mileage right now.

    Using a few of these suggestions can give you an almost immediate 10-20% improvement. Using all of them (provided in Sikorsky’s book), can give you 30% or more.

    Hypermilers with the Milwaukee Hybrid Group are regularly able to drive 60-80 mpg, and as high as 90-100 mpg in their Toyota Priuses – the same one that is only rated for 45 Highway and 48 City.

    We could have done this 30 years ago, and our politicians dropped the ball. We can’t afford to wait another 30 years.

    And the best part about the alternatives? When people recognize that there are better, safer, cleaner technologies that cost them less money, they aren’t going to want to use gas burning technology anymore. And when they actually start buying them and using them in large enough numbers, that’s when you’ll see oil prices REALLY drop.

    By the way, McCain keeps pushing his campaign ads to promote “his” alternative energy plan with wind energy, yet he has avoided voting for any of the bills that would have put money into developing those alternatives, like wind energy for almost 30 years. And he recently skipped voting on a bill that would have channeled $13 Billion in oil company tax breaks into alternative energy development right now. His ONE VOTE for the measure would have allowed the bill to pass, but he skipped the vote in deference to his Oil Masters.

    http://wisc5thcddems.com/OilyJohn.aspx

    http://www.democrats.org/page/invite/exxonjohn

    How much help would $13 Billion have provided for your Wind Turbine brake business Bill?

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