Can she be McCain's Veep and still do what needs to be done in Alaska? There is no other area of this country as critical to assuring our petroleum reserves over the next few decades (beyond the Gulf Coast), other than Alaska. Yes, we need to drill on the Continental Shelves (Atlantic, and Pacific). And, yes, the Gulf Coast is nearly as fecund a source of petroleum as Alaska.

But every other area requires cooperation between states: the expertise isn't concentrated like it is in the Last Frontier. Inter-state cooperation wouldn't be rquired as it would be in the Gulf, and to harvest the shale oil in Utha, Colorado, and Wyoming.

If the Feds—and by that, I mean silly Northeastern congresscritters—would get out of the way, this could happen in a safe, efficient manner that would help to get the boot of Middle Eastern fascism off the faces of the normal people in the world while we develop more sustainably forms of energy.

Every other option we have on the table (other than building a few well-made, God-fearing nuclear plants) will take some new engineering. As Governor Palin states, drilling in ANWR is something we know how to do, and the area in question is a tiny sliver of land—akin to a metropolitan airport.

Plus, the whole operation is a stone's throw from Prudhoe Bay, so we can do what we did there: but better, faster, and in an even more environmantally friendly way.

Plus, Palin is smokin' hot. Look her in the face, consider how popular she is among her constituents, and tell me she's wrong. Come on: it can't be done.

Via Hot Air, which quoted my own Governor running off at the mouth about how he'll keep his Hummer running by . . . . I dunno: getting Production Assistants to peddle really hard, and turning the thing into a giant, combat-ready rickshaw. I didn't read Arnold's critique really carefully. I think he likes being homecoming queen around here, and discussing realistic sources of energy would knock that crown right off his head.

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PJM's Zubrin has found the pearl in the oyster of McCain's energy policy. And it's a badass mabe pearl, too. Because (1) I'm a selfish asshole, and (2) I don't trust everyone to "go read the whole thing," I'll quote extensively, because this is a pivotal point.

Zubrin begins with the proposed prize for developing a bitchin' battery for use in electric and hybrid vehicles—because of course no one's really working on that project . . .

More to the point, why focus on battery development at all as a major element of energy policy? With or without revolutionary batteries, there is no realistic prospect at all of electric or hybrid cars gaining a sufficient share of the American market — let alone worldwide car sales — on a time scale fast enough to do anything significant to stop the crushing of the United States by the Islamist-led oil cartel.

LetÂ’s stop fooling around. This year the United States will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $130/barrel, the bill for that will come to $650 billion, or more than five times the cost of the Iraq war. Add to that $400 billion the Americans will pay for domestic oil, and our total fuel bill this year will come to over a trillion dollars, and the world as a whole will pay $4 trillion. These petroleum costs are up a factor of twelve from what they were in 1999, and represent a huge highly-regressive tax on the world economy. For Americans, the $1000 billion oil levy is equivalent to a 40% increase in income taxes across the board - with sixty percent of the sum being paid over in tribute to foreign governments.

Averaged over the US population of 300 million people, the $1000 billion OPEC tax levies a tribute amounting to $3300 per head — for every man, woman, and child in the country, or $13,300 for a family of four. The average American worker makes about $45,000 per year, or $35,000 after taxes paid to Uncle Sam. In 1999, such a worker supporting a family of four had to pay 3% of his disposable income for oil. Now Uncle Saud and Uncle Hugo are taxing him for over 38% of his take-home pay. Is it any wonder that such people are not buying houses? Such a massive drain of cash from the pockets of consumers must perforce collapse the real estate market — as well as that for many other kinds of consumer goods.

So, as a result of this massive tax increase — by far the largest in American history — the United States is being driven into a recession. Subjected to the same tax, Europe and Japan will follow, while poor third world countries who can afford high oil prices even less will be pushed towards starvation. And as the misery spreads, the Saudis and other OPEC potentates are putting together huge Sovereign Wealth Funds to execute takeovers of the western corporations their extortion forces into insolvency. Indeed, OPEC will clear $1.5 trillion in net export profits this year. The entire worth of the US Fortune 500 is $18 trillion. So at their current rate of looting, OPEC will accumulate enough cash to buy majority control of the entire Fortune 500 within 6 years.

This is a 5-alarm emergency. The oil crisis is not a matter of high fill-up prices, or even the loss of economic prosperity. Our independence is at stake. Under such circumstances, McCain’s proposals for battery prizes, enforcing CAFE standards, encouraging “zero-emission vehicles,” and even opening the east and west coast continental shelves to oil exploration, range from silly to, at best, marginally relevant.

Fortunately, however, there was one proposal that McCain put forward that could really make a difference. This was his call to require that all new cars sold in the USA be flex fueled.

Flex fuel cars can run on any combination of alcohol (including methanol and ethanol) or gasoline. The technology is readily available and it only costs about $100 per vehicle.

Making America a flex-fuel vehicle market would effectively make flex-fuel the international standard, as all significant foreign car makers would be impelled to convert their lines over as well. Within three years of such a mandate, there would be 50 million cars on the road in the USA capable of running on alternate fuels, and hundreds of millions more worldwide. Around the globe, gasoline would be forced to compete at the pump against alcohol fuels made from any number of sources, including not only current commercial crops like corn and sugar, but cellulosic ethanol made from crop residues and weeds, as well as methanol, which can be made from any kind of biomass without exception, as well as coal, natural gas, and recycled urban trash. Creating such an open-source fuel market would enormously expand and diversify humanityÂ’s fuel resource base, protecting all nations from continued blackmail, robbery, and in some cases, starvation, induced by the oil cartel.

Methanol is selling today, without any subsidy, for $1.50/gallon on the spot market, equivalent in energy terms to gasoline at $2.80/gallon. Make cars that can choose between methanol and gasoline, and the power of OPEC to set high prices will be broken for good — everywhere in the world.

So break out the champagne. Amidst a pile of campaign nonsense, John McCain just set forth one policy that could save the nation.

Emphasis all mine. And, hey—I called it.

h/t: Reynolds.

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Every once in a while, the man makes a good point.*

Congress has always had a soft spot for “experts” who tell members what they want to hear, whether it’s supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth. Right now, the welcome mat is out for analysts who claim that out-of-control speculators are responsible for $4-a-gallon gas.

Back in May, Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager, made a big splash when he told a Senate committee that speculation is the main cause of rising prices for oil and other raw materials. He presented charts showing the growth of the oil futures market, in which investors buy and sell promises to deliver oil at a later date, and claimed that “the increase in demand from index speculators” — his term for institutional investors who buy commodity futures — “is almost equal to the increase in demand from China.”

Many economists scoffed: Mr. Masters was making the bizarre claim that betting on a higher price of oil — for that is what it means to buy a futures contract — is equivalent to actually burning the stuff.

But members of Congress liked what they heard, and since that testimony much of Capitol Hill has jumped on the blame-the-speculators bandwagon.

Somewhat surprisingly, Republicans have been at least as willing as Democrats to denounce evil speculators. But it turns out that conservative faith in free markets somehow evaporates when it comes to oil. For example, National Review has been publishing articles blaming speculators for high oil prices for years, ever since the price passed $50 a barrel.

And it was John McCain, not Barack Obama, who recently said this: “While a few reckless speculators are counting their paper profits, most Americans are coming up on the short end — using more and more of their hard-earned paychecks to buy gas.”

Why are politicians so eager to pin the blame for oil prices on speculators? Because it lets them believe that we donÂ’t have to adapt to a world of expensive gas.

No. It's because we don't want to tackle the most important steps:

• increase use of natural gas for transportation needs;

• build environmentally sensitive, clean-burning nuclear power plants so we can develop the electricity to use for our electric cars;

• enhance harvesting of domestic petroleum (in ANWR, on the Continental Shelf, and in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah);

• increase use of shale oil—that is, reverse the moratorium on its harvesting‐and repeal the prohibition on its use for military applications;

• create a fair, flat, arch-capitalist playing field among the various biofuels we're researching; and

• encourage flex-fuel vehicles that will take either petroleum products or biofuels, thereby insulating the economy from market shocks as supplies of different types of fuels wax and wane.

Do I sound like a broken record, here? That is most certainly my intent.

* James Thurber [from memory, but it should be close]:

Don't get the impression that writers never agree at parties. They usually do, once during the course of the evening; it generally sounds like this: "you're right, you're absolutely right. The problem is, you don't have the faintest idea why you're right."

h/t: The Memesters.

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We've got a lot of competing fuels out there, and the more choices the consumer has, the better. Via one of my favorite roundups on biofuel research, National Geographic's cover feature from October of last year, Brazil's experience provides an instructive example:

It's easy to lose faith in biofuels if corn ethanol is all you know. A more encouraging picture unfolds some 5,500 miles southeast of Mead, where the millions of drivers of São Paulo, Brazil, spend hours a day jammed to a standstill in eight lanes of traffic, their engines, if not their tempers, idling happily on álcool from Brazil's sprawling sugar belt. The country had been burning some ethanol in its vehicles since the 1920s, but by the 1970s it was importing 75 percent of its oil. When the OPEC oil embargo crippled the nation's economy, Brazil's dictator at the time—Gen. Ernesto Geisel—decided to kick the country's oil habit. The general heavily subsidized and financed new ethanol plants, directed the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to install ethanol tanks and pumps around the country, and offered tax incentives to Brazilian carmakers to crank out cars designed to burn straight ethanol. By the mid-1980s, nearly all the cars sold in Brazil ran exclusively on álcool.

Formula One-loving Brazilian drivers embraced the cars, especially since pure ethanol has an octane rating of around 113. It burns best at much higher compression than gasoline, allowing alcohol engines to crank out more power. Best of all, the government subsidies made it significantly cheaper. Not that ethanol didn't hit a few bumps in the road. By the early 1990s, low oil prices led the government to phase out the subsidies, and high sugar prices left the sugar mills, or usinas, with no incentive to produce the fuel. Millions of alcohol car drivers like Roger Guilherme, now a supervising engineer at Volkswagen-Brazil, were left high and dry.

"Guys like me had to wait in long lines two hours or more to fuel up," Guilherme says in his office at the massive Volkswagen plant in São Bernardo do Campo. "Consumers lost confidence in the alcohol program." A decade later when oil prices started to rise, Brazilians wanted to burn alcohol again, but given their past experience, they didn't want to be wedded to it. So Guilherme's bosses gave him a challenge: Find an inexpensive way for one car to burn both fuels. Guilherme's team worked with engineers at Magneti Marelli, which supplies fuel systems to Volkswagen, to write new software for the engine's electronic control unit that could automatically adjust the air-fuel ratio and spark advance for any mixture of gasoline and alcohol. Volkswagen introduced Brazil's first TotalFlex vehicle in 2003, modifying a small soccer ball of a commuter car called the Gol, which means—you guessed it—"goal!" It was an instant hit, and soon every other carmaker in Brazil followed suit.

Today, nearly 85 percent of cars sold in Brazil are flex: small, sporty designs that zip around the lumbering, diesel-belching trucks in São Paulo. You can even get a flex Transporter—the beloved loaf-shaped VW van, still made here. With a liter of alcohol running an average of one Brazilian real cheaper than gasoline at the pump, most flex cars haven't burned gas in years. Sugarcane, not engine technology, is the real key to Brazil's ethanol boom. The sweet, fast-growing tropical grass has been a staple export for the country since the 1500s. Unlike corn, in which the starch in the kernel has to be broken down into sugars with expensive enzymes before it can be fermented, the entire sugarcane stalk is already 20 percent sugar—and it starts to ferment almost as soon as it's cut. Cane yields 600 to 800 gallons (2,300 to 3,000 liters) of ethanol an acre, more than twice as much as corn.

Flexibility, as much as keeping supply somewhere in the neighborhood of demand, is not just a good idea: given how closely linked our energy challenges are to our national security challenges, it is our duty to demand not just

(1) hybrid vehicles;

(2) improved use of electricity for our vehicles [better batteries, more use of plug-in cars];

(3) enhanced use of natural gas for transportation;

(4) building of state-of-the-art, environmentally sensitive, clean-burning nuclear power plants so we can get the electricity to use for our electric and hybrid-electric cars (whether they are Priuses or Volts or something even better);

(5) enhanced harvesting of domestic petroleum (primarily in ANWR, since we have the technology to do that right now in an efficient, environmentally responsible fashion), but also on the Continental Shelf, and in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah;

(6) increased use of shale oil—and a repeal of the prohibition on its use for military applications;

(7) a fair, flat playing field among the various biofuels we're researching;

( flex-fuel vehicles that will take either petroleum products or biofuels, and insulate the economy from market shocks as supplies of different types of fuels wax and wane; and

(9) Get rid of the tariff on imported ethanol.

It's time to roll up our sleeves, here.

UPDATE: Darth Aggie had to remind me of item #9. Added!

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From Popular Mechanics:

Amidst increasing criticisms of ethanol's shortcomings—lower energy density, energy-intensive production and distillation, and the inability to transport the fuel within existing pipelines—a growing handful of companies are betting that the biofuels of the future will look almost identical to the petroleum-based fuels of the present.

"It's getting easier and easier, but it still takes a decent amount of effort to engineer a biological system into doing something that you want it to do," says Neil Renninger, co-founder of four-year-old Amyris Biotechnologies, a company that previously engineered microbes to churn out inexpensive antimalarial drugs. "So before going down the route of engineering a bug to make a biofuel, we wanted to make sure we were making the best biofuel possible."

The claim is that these "test tube" biofuels approach the energy-density of gasoline itself.

Faster, please.

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I may need to go to Alberta, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming to do some petroleum research. So please send me more money; thanks.

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Poor people produce energy (unless they live in Alaska or Utah, where it's just naughty to do so). Rich people consume energy, but—as with sausages—they don't want to know where it comes from.

This is a genius picture by Rick Lee; for the backstory, go here. My point is that this isn't the view from the Kennedy compound, where even wind farms are verboten.

h/t for the Surber story: Glenn. h/t for the Rick Lee story; Surber.

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It's time:

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we could go grab the oil out from under the tundra, and the prairies and the plains and the water and the continental shelves that aren't controlled by dictatorships, while we develop alternatives to burning "petrol."

And then the dictators could go . . . pound sand.

How many times do I have to reiterate that alternative fuels and producing more here in North America are not either/or propositions?

h/t: Insty.

Gotta go, now: I'm picking out my next car: maybe a hydrogen-powered Honda? Who knows?

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1 Six hundred bucks a month for a lease seems a little steep to me. Then again I'm used to purchasing vehicles with most of the initial depreciation already worn off.

Posted by: Desert Cat at June 24, 2008 12:29 PM (6go9w)

2 The more fuel-efficient cars they sell new, the bigger the selection you and I have after they're "broken in."

Posted by: Attila Girl at June 24, 2008 01:06 PM (1q/ac)

3 That won't be working out so well with the Priuses. By the time they're "broken in", the expected battery lifespan will be about exhausted, and then their value will drop like a lead albatross. IIRC the replacement cost is around $5k, and that includes a Toyota subsidy. Ironically it is the Tercel (manual transmission version) that is/should be the real "green" choice in the Toyota fleet.

Posted by: Desert Cat at June 24, 2008 03:03 PM (6go9w)

4 Ok, a little more research shows me that is probably outdated price info. As long as the car is still under warranty, the worst that happens is being stranded by a suddenly dead battery. Still...a Tercel can be good for 250k miles. Calling the "lifespan of the car" only 100k is saying something about the true longevity of these vehicles.

Posted by: Desert Cat at June 24, 2008 04:42 PM (6go9w)

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. . . . family cars of the future?

Pretty good, for a vehicle that doesn't fly. It's supposed to fly, you know.

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"What I meant was that I was against drilling in ANWR as long as there was one Alaskan in the entire state who did not support the idea. And I found her, two years ago: she's a lesbian who lives in an anarcho-syndicalist collective with three other ladies who draw their water from the local township's pump, have turned their living room into a hothouse, and sport a moose-proof fence outside their garden that is 15-feet high and reminded me vaguely of the perimeter defenses in Jurassic Park.

Now that the girls have pointed out that it takes some petrol to get their our-of-season heirloom purple-and-white-striped tomatoes to the local farmer's market, I've decided that that the residents of a state should actually have some say in whether that state's petroleum resources are harvested to tide us over the next 25 years, until we are all using fast-food fryer oil to power our private jets . . . what do you mean, that shit doesn't wok for aviation? Say what?"

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So, drilling off of the coasts wouldn't be a quick fix for the current energy crisis? Way to harsh my mellow, WSJ.

Um. How stupid do they think we are? More to the point: how stupid are they?

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I had a great conference call with the folks from the API to discuss domestic energy production (focusing on natural gas and petroleum products). There was a lot of material to absorb, but as it turns out there is a great deal that the average citizen can do to break the logjams created by state and Federal legislatures.

Bottom line: We are now experiencing shortfalls that because ten years ago our legislators failed to give the energy industry enough latitude to do what has to be done. Now we are "saving the environment" by having tankers bring us crude oil from halfway around the world—which increases the chances of environmental mishaps and is in and of itself an energy drain.

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dinner dates, and flowers."

Iraqi tea.

Via Hot Air.

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Make energy and the economy your issues, and therein outflank Obama, who wants to go the "alternative energy only" route.

Or, as the biggest political genius of my lifetime used to put it, "it's the economy, stupid."

Via Insty, who remarks that ultimately "hairshirt environmentalism" never ends up being very popular with voters (no matter what they say, I might add, in their more idealistic moments).

I think we can have both: alternative fuels and more development of petroleum reserves. But we have to do it sensibly, and right now gasoline and electricity are our most cost-effective options. Let's not limit ourselves, or risk another recession.

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Chilean President Michelle Bachelet is a >go-getter, meeting with the Canadian head of state and with Governor Schwarzenegger in quick succession in an attempt to grapple with her country's energy needs.

I would love to see solar power become cost-effective for something other than heating swimming pools; certainly the next few applications for that may be residential, until we've improved fuel-cell technology. But Chile and California (the world's seventh-largest economy) have a lot in common in this regard: Chile imports three-quarters of its energy, and the U.S. as a whole is importing over half its petroleum products.

(X-posted at Right-Wing News. Scroll around there, though: my old buddy William Teach [one of the illustrious blogospheric pirates] is posting today, as is Kathy Shaidle, the embattled Canadian blogger and free speech heroine with whom I disagree on nearly every social issue.)

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Yeah, yeah: I'm still obsessing about infrastructure, and conservation, and how we live, and how we commute. I know Americans love the suburban life, with the private backyard concept. And yet generations of New Yorkers have been taking their kids to public parks instead of hanging out in backyards . . . with little apparent brain damage. (Though I will concede that they talk funny.)

Of course, I spent my formative years in Santa Monica, California, and it was the best of both worlds: a suburb of Los Angeles on a small enough scale that one could walk around in it. I think that Santa Monica and Manhattan may be the most pedestrian-friendly places on the planet. (Manhattan being a smidge more vertical, and a smidge more counter-intuitive to get around in.)

But if I had to choose, I'd pick living in a smaller place without a backyard, and being able to walk—versus having a yard but being forced to drive everywhere I go. (Oh, wait: I just made that choice, and I find it more delightful every day.)

It isn't a matter of one's carbon footprint (though as you know I'm a foreign-policy conservationist, and I have been recycling longer than anyone I know). It's burnout, really: I spent years of my life losing 1.5-2 hours each working day just getting to and fro. Now I work on-site only when I have to (but stagger my hours so I'm getting there before or [preferably] after the rush hour), and I work from home when I can. And if I were doing a staff job I'd find a way to carpool or use public transportation at least two days a week, concentrating my errands-on-the-way-home into the other days.

I means, I loves to drive, but enough is enough.

h/t: Insty originally turned me on to this article about how freaking old our transportation infrastructure is (other, of course, than in the Bay Area and in Washington, D.C.). And L.A., I guess, though that system doesn't appear to go anywhere. After that, I just followed the links. Kind of like commuting, but . . . it's less important to have a good sound system when one is travelling through "cyberspace." (A word I haven't heard in years, and am starting to feel wistful about.)

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Throw in ANWR and Utah, and we'd really be on our way.

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