Monday, August 04, 2008
Oil slick: Did Obama flop in time?
Barack Obama put forward a broad energy plan Monday designed to end U.S. reliance on imported oil within 10 years and shore up his standing amid a tightening White House race and high-anxiety over gas prices.
Obama's proposal, though, includes two significant reversals of positions he has taken in the past: He had steadfastly fought the idea of limited new offshore drilling and was against tapping the nation's emergency oil stockpile to relieve pump prices that have stubbornly hovered around $4 a gallon.
Hey, that's more (Bill) Clinton than Clinton, up to and including the bad idea of tapping the strategic petroleum reserve! It is good to see Senator Obama feeling the heat, though. Next thing you know he'll be proposing that we build nukes instead of coal plants and motivating oil companies to produce more, rather than less. Yes, well, McCain would have to be up ten points for that big a swing, but we can always dream.
18 Comments:
By 
Who Struck John, at
Mon Aug 04, 08:22:00 PM:
A flop in time saves nine (percentage points, that is). Or at least that's what he's hoping.
It says something about the Democratic base that Clinton had to move to Obama's positions, but Obama has to move to McCain's ...
By 
, at
Mon Aug 04, 09:03:00 PM:
I've said it before and I will say it again: compromise is fine. I have mentioned it before as something liberals can get behind, if the right incentives are on the table. Were he unwilling to compromise, you would be complaining that he wasn't representing a conciliatory executive. "Gotcha" games are only impressive when it's not a catch-22, (if they ever are impressive.)
By , at
Mon Aug 04, 09:10:00 PM:
Obama is going to say whatever's needed to get votes and to his defense, I don't think he really knows WHAT he truly believes himself. That's the problem. No backbone.
Can anyone tell me how tapping the oil "reserves" is a good idea? How's that gonna help long term? What about an attack on the U.S. and OPEC cuts off our supply.
By JPMcT, at
Mon Aug 04, 09:35:00 PM:
Just a couple of random thoughts:
Obama is like the guy in the clubbing shirt meeting the "foxes" at the disco....he will say or do anything to get his way...then the party is over. We aren't voters...we are useful idiots.
By the way...If we all convert to electric cars, what happens when the electricity goes out??
By , at
Mon Aug 04, 09:55:00 PM:
JPM: What the hell kind of response is that? If anything, plug-in electrics ease the burden on the electrical grid, because the lack of demand response and inconsistency of load create volatility in energy pricing on an hourly basis, and this volatility fails to incentivize plants with higher startup costs from running continuously as opposed to only for peak hours. Charging plug-ins overnight mitigates this, solving for the production incentives.
Duh.
See the congressional testimony by the CEO(?) of PJM for more on this, and the math behind what would effectively be $1/gal gas.
The short and sweet response: the same thing that happens in a similar cataclysmic and unlikely hypothetical involving a petroleum boycott: you work with the reserves you have until the sources come back online.
By Papa Ray, at
Mon Aug 04, 10:32:00 PM:
I love it when enviros talk about electricity.
Let us talk about this when we don't have enough even for lights at night, not counting the millions of airconditioners and other appliances. Yea, lets plug into the grid. What Grid? The one that the enviro-terrorists want to hamstring by not allowing anymore coal or nuke plants.
Get Real.
Papa Ray
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Mon Aug 04, 10:46:00 PM:
Wind turbines on Capitol Hill could give the nation enough electricity for centuries.
By , at
Mon Aug 04, 11:07:00 PM:
@ Papa Ray:
You know nothing about me, or about energy policy. I'm not advocating for some mysterious hippie cause in your paranoid-delusional mind, I am citing the recent congressional testimony of the CEO of a major US ISO; such a figure in the power markets would be as close to an anti-enviro as you would find, to the point where the collision of the two would probably cause annihiliation and create pure energy.
Educate yourself, ignoramus:
http://www.pjm.com/documents/downloads/presentations/20080730-WTB-Senate-Testimony-written.pdf
Also, as regards nukes, if I recall correctly the Air Force was able to misplace actual nuclear weapons as recently as last month. Do you seriously think that whatever administration you might put in place would police radioactive refuse better? Given the massive security problems you are likely to inherit as demonstrated in the above comparison, is the usage of such radioactive detritus in dirty bombs of no consequence in your mind? Think, type, think again, submit.
By JPMcT, at
Tue Aug 05, 06:39:00 AM:
To Anonymous:
Wonderful, if not verbose, description of power grid and power loading...all of which will come to a screeching halt during a natural disaster and leave all the electric car owners with no way to evacuate. Perhaps you can catch a ride with a Big Oil consumer.
Duh!
By , at
Tue Aug 05, 07:36:00 AM:
Doesn't electricity come from the good karma residing in the plug on the wall? Yea man, cool. That's the ticket.
By , at
Tue Aug 05, 07:56:00 AM:
@JPM:
At the point where your argument depends on large swaths of people being blissfully ignorant of an impending hurricane, I'll claim the high ground of things that will actually happen. Additionally, we sacrifice autonomy for convenience all the time, as in highways, airlines, and cruise ships. The "what if..." arguments have to be plausible to be reasonable, or else I will just mention that possibly someone will use a computer virus to cause seizures. Does this mean we abstain from using computers? I obviously don't, but if you think your arguments are persuasive you can unplug now.
By , at
Tue Aug 05, 08:18:00 AM:
The energy crisis is not anything new. If you take the time to remember comments from our past, the greens have continually tried to force American's to conserve by crisis.
The late 60's and 70's were full of quotes by leading greens saying that they were going to force Americans to their energy knees so that we would conserve. Now that is coming to fruition.
Obama is no different than any of the other politicians on Capital Hill.
Remember, when ANWAR was founded Congress deliberately set aside the area for oil drilling that our greens are crying about drilling in now. There is more oil in Prudhoe Bay than there is in all of Arabia, but we are not allowed to use it. There are other oil deposits on the Artic Shelf but we are not allowed to use them.
The current energy crisis is years of Americans letting politicians drive us into the ground.
Dave
By davod, at
Tue Aug 05, 09:36:00 AM:
"I will just mention that possibly someone will use a computer virus to cause seizures. Does this mean we abstain from using computers?"
Someone used a virus to disrupt the electric power supply in Australia a couple of years ago.
By Dawnfire82, at
Tue Aug 05, 09:44:00 AM:
"Also, as regards nukes, if I recall correctly the Air Force was able to misplace actual nuclear weapons as recently as last month. Do you seriously think that whatever administration you might put in place would police radioactive refuse better?"
So in your mind, there's no difference between atomic weapons and atomic fuel?
And what, exactly, does the administration have to do with lazy airmen not following appropriate safety steps?
Think, type, think again, then submit.
By JPMcT, at
Tue Aug 05, 06:44:00 PM:
@ Anonymous
"large swaths of people being blissfully ignorant of an impending hurricane"
Gee...let me think....has that ever happened?? Wait! It's coming to me now....some vague memory of New Orleans...was it Katina, Cantina...gee, it must not have been important...you must be right.
Sorry for bringing it up. I am SURE that if some silly thing like that ever happened, we would have a few Republicans around to blame.
By Purple Avenger, at
Tue Aug 05, 07:50:00 PM:
If we too our collective heads out of our arses and built some LPMEOH methanol plants, then all our coal would suddenly become our "SPR".
By , at
Tue Aug 05, 09:58:00 PM:
@ JPM:
If you actually think people woke up to the rains of Katrina being shocked at the forecast, I guess I am just speechless. I was under the impression that not everyone left because some stayed home, some stayed with elderly family, and others didn't have any transportation to begin with, gas or electric. But I suppose an advantage to your version of foresight is the ability to hide your own Easter eggs.
@Dawnfire:
It's a comparison test: nuclear waste is not (or at least shouldn't ever be) more secure than our actual nukes, and yet the latter aren't totally secure. This doesn't seem to bode well for controlling access to the waste. You might bury it on site to avoid transit risks, but can you be sure people won't just be "lazy"? Or that the right people will even be hired in the first place?
I like nukes in theory. The science is incredible and awesome in the "awe" sense, they're really efficient, and they're really cheap. But until they're secure, I'll note that the biggest plant in the US (by over 3GW) is hydro, and MIT claims to have made a huge advance for solar (and by naive extension, wind.)
@davod: Very interesting. 2006?
@Dave: Wikipedia puts it at 25B barrels, and the CIA worldbook puts Saudi Arabia at 250B. I don't think there's fudge room there.
By JPMcT, at
Tue Aug 05, 10:15:00 PM:
@ anonymous
"If you actually think people woke up to the rains of Katrina being shocked at the forecast, I guess I am just speechless"
Sorry, man...as they say in the business...res ipsa loquitur!
But, then again...as far as unprepared and speechless goes, so were the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana...but what the hell, everybody knows it was Bush's fault.
Clearly, electric cars would have saved the day!
