“Today, for example, we are … continuing to invest in our U.S. refineries, where capacity growth over the last decade has outpaced growth in demand and equates to building a new refinery every three years.”

Hello?

All I did was a quick google search seeking refinery permit requests.

http://www.planetark.com/daily…../story.htm

And, wind energy is growing in the US at over 30% per year and over 60% in Europe. DOE wind site studies show that there is more than three times as much wind energy available in the continental US than we now use. Arizona and Nevada are both building solar concentrators for generation of electricity that are in the multi-megawatt class.

Hydrogen is unrealistic; it takes more energy to extract it than it produces. Oregon State university has developed a credit-card sized device that can convert vegetable oil to bio diesel, and can be stacked together in the thousands to produce commercial scale output.

The “political will” argument is rapidly becoming obsolete; this will become a survival issue very rapidly. But it’s going to have to hurt badly (like $10 per gallon) before we change our lifestyles to fit reality.

And while I am on this rant, what will happen when the boomers retire, and their arthritic bones can’t navigate around the big box stores, and they shop by using the Internet, and have to have stuff delivered? We are looking at a tsunami coming, folks. Universal health care, efficient transportation, universal information access (Internet neutrality)… Yikes, I’d better stop now…

In that light, it isn’t just political damage the Republicans are worried about, it is also having their hands tied wrt Iran. Though not much attention is paid to it, this is yet another example of Bush incompetence. One of the major ideas behind the invasion of Iraq was to free up Iraqi oil for pumping by US companies, thereby both lowering oil prices and upping Exxon/Mobile profits.

But this is where the ReThug fostered ignorance of the sheeple comes back to bite them in their asses. Fred Fundie and Goober from Georgia aren’t gonna blame anybody but BushWhackey for high prices. That’s just how it is. Go check out Professor Polkatz’s work if yer don’t believe me.

Big oil didn’t want more refineries: they said so. We are drilling off the coast of Florida, it’s call the Gulf of Mexico. ANWR would take a decade to produce 1% of the energy consumed in the US in 2000.

See how dumb you would have to be in order to still be a conservative these days? Corporate money goes in, bullshit comes out, and FOX News viewers eat it up.

Pathetic.
.

The Smart Car is widely used everywhere in the world EXCEPT in the USA. Supposedly it gets 65 mpg, which is a nice start, and it’ll do 85 mph. Ever try to find a parking space in ANY European city? It’s imported by a co. called ZAP which does conversions to match US safety and environmental stds. BUT, is selling for about $25,000. Mercedes was making a 4 passenger version, but I’ve never seen one. However, Mercedes does not sell any of them them here because it believes American tastes still run to SUV’s. Subject to change, and FAST!

Bring on the revolution and BURN BABY BURN!

We are paying over $3.00 a gallon because Bush wants to start a war with Iran.

Connection? The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

In response to the rising gasoline prices nationwide, Bush stated that he will temporarily stop depositing crude oil into the SPR, crude oil that could be going to the refineries to make gasoline.

Immediately, people spoke up saying that this relatively small amount would have a negligible effect of gasoline prices.

Peter Beutel in a CNN.com story said only 30,000 barrels of crude were being deposited daily. A Dow Jones report stated that the figure was 70,000 barrels a day. Weird. Why the large discrepancy and from where did they get their figures?

For background, Congress authorized the expansion of the SPR by 250 million barrels of crude oil, from about 750 million barrels to 1 billion barrels…and Bush ordered the maxing out of the SPR crude oil supply. Odds are that Bush/Cheney also ordered their Republican-puppets in Congress to increase the SPR’s capacity.

Now, concerning the 250 million barrels of crude oil needed to fill’er up, at 30,000 barrels a day, it would take over 20 years to top off the SPR. At 70,000 barrels a day, it would take about 10 years.

But we all know Bush is an impatient brat, and with his desire to attack Iran (after such a huge success in Iraq), then he has to have ordered the speeding up of this timeline.

So,

1 million barrels of crude deposited in the SPR each day: about 8 months to fill’er up.

2 million barrels each day: about 4 months.

3 million barrels each day: just under 3 months.

Of course, at any of these “deposit” rates, the higher percentage of imported crude oil going into the being-expanded-as-we-speak SPR would mean less making it to our nation’s refineries, which would drive up gas prices at the pump. And this would be the major contributing factor to rising gasoline prices recently.

Is this why the Republican’s have gone on the offensive? Blaming the environmentalists? Like they blamed the environmentalists and environmental lawsuits filed decades ago for the New Orleans’ levee failures during Katrina? Trying to divert attention from what Bush let slip, when he revealed that he’d been secretly depositing an unknown amount of imported crude oil into the SPR, thus diverting it from the oil refineries? Thus driving up gas prices?

I went to the DOE’s SPR website. I didn’t find any mention of 30,000 or 70,000 barrels being deposited into the SPR. The only recent activity concerns oil companies that received an SPR oil “loan” last year after Katrina who are “paying back” the SPR to make up for what they’d received.

Has Bush classified what he’s been doing with the SPR (i.e. surreptitiously depositing whatever amount of crude oil into it at whatever rate) for “national security” purposes?

Hey, they’ve got a war to plan, and pumping as much crude oil into the SPR as possible beforehand would help offset any oil supply disruptions that might occur because of their starting a war with Iran…right?

Something’s fishy.

And the Strategic Petroleum Reserve often seems to be at the center of the Bush administration’s war planning. For example, in their lead-up to starting war with Iraq, the Bush administration also ordered the filling up of the SPR.

Hmmmm. Just a coincidence? I doubt it.