Shots Across The Bow

Attack the Policies, not the Man

Well, that's easy enough to do.

For example, John Kerry has said he wants to stop building up our emergency reserves in order to drop the price of a gallon of gas.

Given that we are currently at war with an opponent that has shown the willingness to blow themselves and their own countrymen up in order to prevent a little freedom from creeping in to the Middle East, is there anybody (other than John Kerry) who thinks it would be a good strategy to keep our strategic reserve at anything other than maxed out?

OK, maybe one or two of you out there thinks the strategic reserve isn't that important, that lower prices at the pump outweigh our nation security. Just how much does the strategic reserve affect gasoline prices?

Well, let's just check it out. From the same story, we see that the strategic reserve is drawing of about 150,000 barrels a day. Oil is traded at a rate of 86, 000,000 barrels a day. Whipping out the trusty pocket calculator, the strategic reserve is tapping a whopping 0.17% of the global trade. So what does that mean at the pump? The average price for a gallon of gas is $1.80. 0.17% of that is 0.3 cents per gallon. I drive a lot, about 50,000 miles per year. At 28 mpg, I average about 1785 gallons of gas per year. At 0.3 cents per gallon, over the course of a year, I would save $5.36.

And they laughed at the Bush tax cuts as paltry.

Sen. Kerry, if it's all the same to you, I'll sleep better at night knowing the nation's tanks are topped off, and consider it a bargain at $5.00 per year.

I tried to put together a detailed critique of Kerry's energy policy, but in the end had to stop because there are almost no details to critique. As is typical of an election campaign, the Kerry plan is long on sizzle and short on steak. Very rarely do you find any numbers, and never do you see associated costs, although they are quick to point out potential savings. Here's a couple of examples of what I'm talking about. The following headers are directly from Kerry's website.

1. A New ‘Energy Security and Conservation Trust’

   He plans to use funds from existing fees and royalties to fund research into more efficient cars, and to pave the way for a hydrogen economy. Sounds great, right? He's going to use existing funds in a new way, so we'll get hybrid cars and fuel cells for free.

   Except that these fees are already funding other projects, which will either have to be cut, or need additional funding (ie a tax/fee increase). Kerry's plan is silent on this. Also, as I've writen about extensively, hydrogen as an energy source suffers a myriad of problems, chiefly that the cheapest way to get hydrogen is through steam reformation of methane, a process that take more energy than it produces, not to mention releases all those nasty greenhouse gasses we're trying to avoid. Using more energy in an attempt to save energy is a strategy only a Democrat could love.

   
   
2. Reducing Oil Dependence by Two Million Barrels of Oil a Day
   

   Hmmm. According to the most recent 4 week average, we produced 5.6 million barrels per day, and imported 9.4 million barrels per day, which gives us a total consumption of 15 million barrels per day. Kerry claims that only about 2 million of that comes from the Middle East, which while true is misleading, since the amount of oil we import from OPEC is about 4 million barrels per day, with the balance coming from non-Middle Eastern nations, which means that even if we did cut our usage by 2 million barrels a day, we'd still be dependent on OPEC, which means by default, the Middle East. The problem is that the OPEC cartel controls roughly 40% of global crude supply, which means they will set global price regardless of which country we actually buy our oil from.

   To be fair, I support reducing our dependence on oil, whether foreign or domestic. However, we need to have a realistic plan for doing so. According to his website, Sen. Kerry plans to achieve this reduction by requiring an increase in the CAFE standard to 37mpg by 2015. What's not mentioned on the website is that he plans to require that this standard be applied to light duty trucks as well as passenger vehicles, so while he claims to support the people's right to drive an SUV if they want, he supports standards that are impossible to meet. Just a little political sleight of hand between friends, right?

   
   
3. A Plan to Use Hydrogen Throughout the Nation By 2020
   

   I simply have to quote this entire block. See if you can detect one hint of a credible plan to achieve this goal:
   

   While John Kerry believes our nation needs a strategy to reduce dependence on oil today, he knows we can harness technological innovation and ingenuity to develop a hydrogen-based economy for the future. Hydrogen has great promise as a clean, domestic, and reliable energy source for the future. It has the potential to power our cars at 100 miles per gallon without pollution and, with the right technology, can be produced efficiently from natural gas and coal. Eventually, John Kerry believes that we can build a truly clean and secure economy based on hydrogen -- a clean fuel that we can eventually get entirely from renewable sources from our farms, the wind, solar energy, hydropower and geothermal sources.

   
   Lies, lies, and damned lies. No technology can produce hydrogen from natural gas or coal efficiently because it's always going to be a losing proposition. It will always take more energy to produce the hydrogen than will be contained in the hydrogen. Why introduce a useless transformation that costs you energy? The rest is sizzle, but no steak. No mention of the limitations of using renewable energy sources to develope the hydrogen, or the scale on which they would have to be used in order to bring us to a hydrogen based economy. The bottom line is that, if we had the alternative energy source capacity to generate the hydrogen, we wouldn't need the hydrogen! Nope, not the faintest whiff of reality, just pie in the sky for you and me.

   
   

OK, that's enough. The rest of the plan is even worse, exhuming tired solutions that have already been dismissed as overly expensive and inadequate. Expanding the brning of coal and natural gas? If we're using them to make hydrogen, we won't have any left to burn for other processes. 20% of power coming from renewable sources? Hell, you can't even put up a windmill anymore without somebody filing a lawsuit because you're blocking the migratory route of the Lesser Michigan Loon or some such idiocy.

Oil is going to run out, and it's going to be fairly soon, within my kid's lifetimes, if not my own. We need a serious energy policy, not one crafted to offend as few people as possible. Alternative sources cannot meet the demands of modern society. Either we accept a drastically reduced standard of living, including a re-education in the Malthusian doctrine (it takes a significant amount of energy to feed 6 billion people), or we look to maximize our use of the technologies that have the potential to replace oil. That isn't hydrogen, not today, and probably not for several decades.

Posted by Rich at April 2, 2004 1:41 PM | TrackBack