I need some information about Humberto Fontova, who has written piece on the benefits of off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, on lew rockwell’s site.

The usual stuff, liberals don’t know nuthin ’bout drillin’ and all they have to do is look at the abundance of sea-life around the oil rigs.

I’ve found a bit, anyone know more about him and his credibility?

.

wake up Merika…the Bushistas have you on an OILY rollercoaster ride to oblivion…..lets all get off

here’s the solution to the oil problem;

“all petro refined in the states is sold in the states”

period

petroleum is a national asset, it’s not private property and the government has SOME NERVE allowing private industry to sell my stuff on the open market

if it’s refined in the states it’s sold in the states, and it should be considered the same thing as water, it is put into a reserve and provided to the populace at cost, the cost of production, salaries, research and refinement

then if we need more WE buy what we need on the open market and contribute to our reserves (and the expense entailed)

that’s the first step

the second is of course mandate alternative propulsion, electricity, hybrid and methanol

the third is fund research into more efficiency and alternative fuels

and legalize the production of hemp for alternative fuels since it is the most efficient, while we’re at it we will legalize it for medicinal purposes as well

this is no lose for our economy, we will be developing a new industry, there will be jobs, quality jobs and labor jobs, there will be scientific advancement and the auto industry will have the best years of their history

ABC News led with the story that Bush today added his voice to the growing chorus to lift the ban on offshore drilling. So far by my count the growing chorus is made up of George Bush, and ABC News.

David Horowitz likes him. Fontova is a Cuban/American right winger. Born in the mid fifties and departing Cuba as a child in 1961, Fontova is a hard line angry righty against Castro (and Che Guevara) and commmunism . Many of the Miami Cuban old guard posess this attitude. Another right-wing polemicist with an anti-government screed that ends up helping republicans.

Yah, that’s basicly what I got, from a review of his book on Che and his biography.

The reviewer said he writes like Coulter.

.

Its a trio. Dubya, The Crypt Keeper, and Crist on flute. ABC and NBC provide the choral backdrop. They’re all for it. According to NBC news, the only opposition is from those silly environmental groups.

I think there will be some public outcry from (Republican) oceanfront property owners. Nothing making the news about that yet.

Sure it isn’t Crist on Toast?

At least Schwarzenegger is on board ….

Governor Schwarzenegger Reiterates Opposition to New Drilling off California’s Coast

http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/9917/

I don’t get to Northern Calif. beaches as often as I would like but I don’t want the view that Southern Calif. has in some locations. I just want to see the Sun Set and not an offshore oil rig. I’m sure digby would like that view in her area.
jo6pac
Everything is on schedule, please move along.

McCain is a longtime opponent of Amtrak, and thinks it’s “leadership” on federal spending to say that it’s one of the “ineffective” programs that should be cut. That tells us everything we need to know about whether he’s serious about global warming or serious about changes that could actually reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The drilling proposal is about as “serious” an effort to reduce gas prices in the short term as his panderrific “gas tax holiday.”

Conveniently lost in the clutter and chaffe, is the notion that all the leases on public land for oil development, has not or is expected to be developed. Thusly, the existing leases continue to prop up the oil prices and the bottom line for the oil companies.

Now, if these leases on public land were abrogated by Congress and done in one fell swoop, more attention would be given to alternative energy sources and first starting with conservation.

Jaango

I wrote this earlier as a comment in scarecrow’s thread this morning.

What almost no one is talking about is that we are near or at peak production levels not just of oil but of energy in general. Only about 1 billion to 1.5 billion of the world’s population enjoys a First World lifestyle. This means that 4.5 billion to 5 billion do not. Even with our energy peaking we are able to afford the conditions for what we think is a good life to only about 1/4 to 1/6 of the world’s population. We are already way beyond the planet’s capacity to provide a reasonable life to its human population. Conservation, energy alternatives, mass transit, community planning, redesigning and restructuring the economy to favor local over long distance solutions (doing away with out of season food stuffs or outsourcing jobs to the other side of the world, for example) are all necessary but insufficient. In the absence of a deus ex machina like large scale practical fusion, the only way to bring the energy/resource/population equation into balance is for population to be reduced. This could be done rationally over the next century or more likely given that our species is not very rational catastrophically through war, famine, and disease.

Excellent as always, Hugh!

I am curious.. Perhaps someone has a link to info on this.

I have read our DOD uses 40 plus percent of American oil consumption? Can’t we stop killing and funding the worlds largest death machine and quickly reduce our oil consumption, by what, a third, in it’s most egregiously wasteful area?

Rationally. What? You think humans are rational?

Mother Nature will take care of the problem, maybe permanently if we don’t wise up. Smart biologists have been saying (very quietly) that humans, as a species, are on the brink of extinction. We have long, useless lives, biologically speaking. We soil and destroy our habitat. There are far too many of us to be sustained. Nature WILL take its course.

I see McSlime wants to build 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030. I just have one question for all the people who like nukes - where are you planning on putting the waste?

I thought I had read that also, but here is a study that was done in 2006 that says DOD only uses about 2 percent of US consumption.
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/fossil.pdf
This was done in 2006 and some of the conclusions are pretty silly (price of oil should drop to $40-50 per barrel in the near future as more oil is developed.

Of course - this study is fossil fuel use only. The DOD’s demands for electricity may be the basis for the 40% - and that is a little harder to tackle since the ‘fuel’ for electricity production includes both fossil and renewable sources.

I heard a report on NPR recently about the Air Force investigating biofuels. During the course of this, they noted that the Pentagon accounted for about 10% of annual consumption of aviation fuel.

Well, there’s one good thing in all of this….oceanfront property in Florida will be substantially more affordable. /s

Conveniently overlooked in the rush to open up oil exploration in the U.S. is the fact that any oil produced would go to the world oil market and NOT be limited to domestic use.
I don’t need any more reason than that to form the basis of my personal objection.

CBS radio is repeating the Cuba lie.

Please help in a campaign of complaints against CBS. There’s an answering machine at the number below. Please help fill it.

Here’s the contact information:

CBS RADIO
1515 Broadway
New York, NY 10036
212-846-3939

http://www.cbsradio.com/contact/sitehelpform.html

Here’s what I wrote:

On Wednesday’s 4:30 radio “newscast”, Harley Carnes repeated an oil industry LIE – as “news” – that was debunked days ago by no less that Florida GOP Senator Mel Martínez.

Even Dick Cheney publicly admitted it was completely untrue that China is drilling for oil between Cuba and Key West.

CBS News is out-lying DICK CHENEY!

Even if you apologize you can’t undo the damage to the millions who heard this bald-faced propaganda.

This is not by any means the first time Mr. Carnes has willfully repeated right-wing talking points known to be false. The man is a blight on journalism and should be fired.

How Fuel-efficient Is the Pentagon? Military’s Oil Addiction

September 10, 2003
Gar Smith / Earth Island Journal (Winter 1990-1)

The military is critically dependent on oil for all of its operations. Oil supplies 79 percent of the Defense Department’s energy needs. But the Pentagon is far from fuel-efficient. This 1991 article found the DOD’s ships, tanks and jets to be leading consumers of the Earth’s oil resources.

In an attempt to determine how much oil has been consumed in the course of Operation Desert Shield’s attempt to save American jobs and secure “our way of life,” Earth Island Journal contacted the Defense Fuel Supply Center. After a brief discussion, a DFSA spokesperson informed us curtly: “I don’t believe we would want to provide that information. We wouldn’t want the enemy to find out.”

Information on military energy consumption is hard to find. One of the few investigations into this topic was written by Tom Cutler in the July 1989 issue of Armed Forces Journal International. “The military’s share of the total oil market in peacetime amounts to only about two-to-three percent of commercial demand,” Cutler reported. Total US oil consumption is 17 million barrels a day (six billion barrels a year), which means the Pentagon may be consuming a little over half a million barrels of the nation’s daily oil diet. But that is not the whole picture since, as Cutler notes, “one-third or more of US military oil consumption occurs outside US territorial boundaries.”

The military is critically dependent on oil for all of its operations. Oil supplies 79 percent of the Defense Department’s energy needs while only eight percent of the military’s energy comes from electricity, eight pecent from natural gas and four percent from coal. Compare this to the world’s energy budget — 34 percent from oil, 20 percent from natural gas, 30 percent from coal, eight percent from nuclear — or the nation’s — 42 percent from oil, 23 percent from natural gas, 22 percent from coal, eight percent from nuclear (1990-91 World Resources and US Department of Energy).

Between wars, one would think the military’s main purpose would be to “guard the peace.” Not so. During times of peace, Tom Cutler writes: “The military’s primary objective [emphasis added] is to ensure adequate oil supplies for the national defense….” Cutler should know: he once headed NATO’s Petroleum Planning Committee and the is the author of The Military Demand for Oil (Petroleum Economist, London, England).

During wartime, the military’s use of energy escalates dramatically. In 1940, the military’s share of the nation’s total energy was only one percent. Five years later, following the outbreak of WWII, military consumption had jumped to 29 percent. (In the post-war era, the military never relinquished its growing claim on the country’s oil. At its peak, the Vietnam War was consuming more than one million barrels of oil a day.)

The Defense Fuel Supply Center is the world’s biggest customer for refined crude oil. The DFSC purchases three-fourths of the military’s oil products from within North America. While only five percent of the Pentagon’s purchases actually come directly from the Middle East, one of the military’s most trusted suppliers had been the Kuwait National Petroleum Company (the ninth largest foreign supplier of US military oil).

GPM — Gallons per Mile
Because the military’s tanks, planes and ships burns fuel at such intense rates, it becomes impractical to talk about consumption in “miles per gallon.” Military fuel use is, instead, tabulated in “gallons-per-mile,” “gallons-per-minute,” and “barrels-per-hour.”

The biggest gas-hogs in the Pentagon’s arsenal are the Navy’s non-nuclear aircraft carriers that burn 134 barrels per hour and battleships which consume 68 barrels per hour. At it top speed of 25 knots, the USS Independence (a 1070-foot-long aircraft carrier with 4.1 acres of flight deck and a crew of 2300) consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day.

Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr. (USN Ret.) of the Washington, DC-based Center for Defense Information, is a former commander of the Independence. While stationed off Vietnam, Adm. Carroll recalls, the ship consumed 100,000 gallons of fuel a day. Every four days the Independence took on a million gallons of new fuel — half of which went to supply the carrier’s jet aircraft. Steaming to the Persian Gulf in 14 days, the Independence would consume more than two million gallons of fuel. Simply “standing by” in the Gulf, the carrier must still consume oil at a voracious pace in order to purify 380,000 gallons of fresh water daily and produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of a city of 40,000 people.

Under standard conditions the Army’s M-1 Abrams tank gets eight gallons per mile. In the heat of battle, however, the M-1 Abrams tank can eat up seven barrels — 252 gallons (based on 36 British Imperial gallons per barrel) — per hour! In actual battlefield simulations, however, these tanks have proven to have a built-in energy-conservation feature — they break down, on average, every 152 miles.

It takes nearly 500,000 gallons a day to supply an armored division of 348 tanks
Neither the Army nor the Navy are the Pentagon’s biggest gas-guzzlers, however — that honor goes to the US Air Force. Altogether, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps aircraft, consume 61 percent of all the Pentagon’s oil.

A B-52 bomber gulps down 86 barrels per hour. F-4 Phantom fighter/bombers devour 40 barrels per hour. At peak thrust, F-15 fighters burn 25 gallons per minute. An F-16 jet on a training mission ignites more fuel in a single hour than the average car owner consumes in two years.

To reach supersonic speeds, a pilot turns on the plane’s afterburners which can triple a jet’s speed and increase fuel consumption twenty times. With its afterburner kicked in, Cutler states, the “relatively fuel-efficient” F-15 fighter torches fuel at the astounding rate of four gallons per second — 14,400 gallons per hour. And as the military opts for bigger, faster, more sophisticated weapons, fuel efficiency continues to plummet.

Now try to magnify these figures by factoring in the 300 US jets stationed on four aircraft carrier groups in the Gulf, another 700 planes stationed in Saudi Arabia and 22 Stealth bombers.

Oil & Logistics
“Fuel is the single largest commodity that military logisticians must transport in terms of both volume and weight,” Culter writes. In a modern military force, he continues, “two-thirds of the weight of supplies would be for petroleum alone.” According to Jane’s [complete title], a fully-loaded C-5 Galaxy cargo plane taking off on a 6000-plus mile flight will weigh more than 418 tons. Nearly 40 percent of that weight — 167 tons — is fuel.

In the first two weeks of Operation Desert Shield, more than two billion pounds of weapons, food, medical supplies and ammunition had to be trucked in from around the US, assembled at distant ports and airfields to be transported more than 7000 miles to the other side of the Earth. The volume of the initial two-week effort exceeded the entire 1945 Berlin Airlift.

The cost of air conditioning alone must be staggering. Water must be cooled to make it palatable. Everything from computers to advanced weapons must be sheltered from the searing heat. Oil is burned to power the air conditions that cool command centers. In order to keep planes flying through heat or chemical fogs, soldiers are trained to use the “Multiman Intermittent Cooling System” — a large air-conditioning unit equipped with ten long hoses used to pump cool air into the chemical warfare suits worn by runway workers.

The US military uses the equivalent of approximately 37 million tons of oil equivalent each year. If the fuel needs of Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons program and the military’s space program were figured in, the Pentagon’s “peacetime” energy bill could top 105 million tons. In his excellent chapter “Assessing the Military’s War on the Environment” in the forthcoming State of the World Report, World Watch researcher Michael Renner writes: “The Pentagon is the single largest consumer [of oil] domestically, and very likely worldwide…. It uses enough energy in 12 months to run the entire US urban mass transit system for almost 14 years.”

Even if war is averted, the hundreds of planes stationed in the Gulf will continue to consume oil, even if they just sit on the ground. To its dismay, the Pentagon has discovered that the intense heat of the desert sun causes the metal skins of the jets to expand, creating fuel leaks.

The Word from Kennebunkport
Press: We haven’t really heard you call upon Americans to conserve as part of this crisis.
President George Herbert Walker Bush: I call upon Americans to conserve.
Press: Will you elaborate?
President Bush: No.

http://envirosagainstwar.org/k.....itemid=593

Okay, then, no damned offshore drilling.

McCain has offered a much, um, brighter new idea. Forty-five
spankin’ new nuclear plants.

Hell, he’s not gonna be around, what does he care?

Big Oil already has all the toys they need to make shit happen.

Let’s use some of their own rhetoric and spew it back in their faces. “Gee, we’d like to let you do that but it wouldn’t be fiscally responsible.” “Gee that sounds great but we really have so many other important things to do”.

Don’t the big Oil Companies own most of the patents for internal combustion engines capable of achieving 60-70 mpg in normal sized autos?

Where do our militery get it’s fuel while in Iraq?

Also, if drilling is allowed along our shores, what makes people think the price of gas or diesel will go down? The greedy *astards will continue to gouge us every way they can.

Don’t the big Oil Companies own most of the patents for internal combustion engines capable of achieving 60-70 mpg in normal sized autos?

If such patents are held, so that “Detroit” can’t produce such automobiles, then the government should invalidate them in the name of national security.

Of course, the current situation is pushing us to get past oil based transportation, but those patents might still be valuable in a bio-diesel hybrid or some other kind of petro vehicle.