The question was posed — by Nole, i believe, although i can’t find the post — concerning just how high the price of gas would rise before we started to change our behaviors and habits…well, i think we’re starting to see our answer.
Filed under: Bush, McCain, Oil, Pebble Mine, alaska, apocalypse, greed, more fucking stupidity
It’s hard to stay optimistic sometimes…especially when “they’re” about to ruin one of my favorite places in the universe:
You know the alien movies when they talk about how the evil aliens move from planet to planet staying only long enough to suck the place dry of every life-sustaining resource until they’re forced to move to the next hospitable place? I don’t know if you know this or not, but that’s us.
Sunday night, i watched The Discovery Channel’s new mini-series, “When We Left Earth” about the history of NASA and our experience of exploring outer-space. It was captivating, moving and absolutely terrific in HD. I couldn’t be more excited to watch the rest of the series.
After the show was over, i got into a conversation with my roommate, who is a computer engineer for a major aeronautical company — he basically works on guidance systems for missiles all day — and we talked about how amazing it was that the engineers, scientists and astronauts for NASA had no precedents to work from, zero research about space travel (because it hadn’t been done before…at all) and did the majority of their calculations and design work with pen and paper. They just had to sit in a room together and try and figure out the best way, and then test it. A perfect example of this would be during the Mercury missions, the precursor to Apollo, when they were trying to simulate zero gravity with astronauts attached to ropes and pulleys…and Buzz Aldrin — an avid scuba diver — said, “Hey guys, why don’t we do this in a pool?” And some of the brightest minds of that generation said, “Duh.” The whole thing was an amazing example of American intelligence, cooperation and ingenuity.
Of course, the whole project was initiated out of a military need to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in our technology and weapons capabilities. Anyone who thinks we just wanted to explore the next frontier is stupid…the reason for our space program had nothing to do with science and everything to do with being able to stop missile launches from Russsia, return fire with our own missiles and spy on them. That’s it.
Beyond that, JFK said — and i’m paraphrasing –, “Start studying math and science so we can put a man on the moon in this decade.” We sent Alan Shepard into orbit on May 5th, 1961 and landed Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon on July 20th, 1969…just 8 years later. With no historical precedent, no concrete knowledge of whether space would suck the eyeballs out of your skull, no idea if zero gravity would cause your blood to boil and not a single clue as to whether the devil himself lived on the moon. Seriously, i’m not exaggerating. We didn’t know. How could we? We just had to try and see what happened. And we succeeded. (Contrast this with Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration” which in 2004 stated that we would be back on the moon by 2018… Really George? It’s going to take 14 years to do something that it only took us 8 years to do in the first place? With 3,000 times the experience and technology they had? Moron.)
Fast forward 40 years (40!!!), we’re currently involved in a war in one of the major oil-producing countries and regions in the entire world. If we had learned anything, ANYTHING! from our past lessons, we’d realize the power these countries have over us and we’d react, not by attacking them, but by pushing our own technology and education systems to put our country in a position in which that region of the world would no longer have power over us. We’d create a community that would try things that had never been tried before, we’d throw billions of dollars at it and we’d put our most courageous, intelligent and scientific minds together and work together until we came up with something that gave us the upper hand in the world again. I’m not talking about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, i’m talking about completely eliminating it. I’m talking about once again leading the world in technology (and scaring the shit out of everyone else in the process.).
We put a man on the moon in 8 years back in the 1960s! And you’re telling me that we can’t make a decent electric car? We’re still burning coal for power? We’re getting worse gas mileage than we were 20 years ago? Our best solution is to drill in the oceans and Alaska, in the very places that we need pristine in order for the human species to survive? Are you kidding?
What in the sweet fuck has happened to us?
(and this isn’t the first time i’ve made this point…i just found this post from Oct. 12th, 2006)
OK, the tank of gas has been used up and i’ve got some results to share.
On May 1st, i filled up after having traveled 318.2 miles using 13.95 gallons of gas…roughly 22.8 mpg.
Since may 1st, i’ve driven more slowly and less aggressively. I can’t say i’ve always gone the speed limit (honestly, driving that slow will get you killed in this town…) but i’ve tried to keep it within 5 miles per hour of the speed limit and i’ve been setting the cruise control at 70 on the freeway, when possible. I also tried to coast up to red lights, stop signs and turns in neutral. Since i drive stick, it’s really easy to put the clutch in and slow down gradually without wasting fuel on acceleration when i’m just going to slam on my brakes a few seconds later. It’s really f-ing obvious when you think about it but when you accelerate, your car creates energy on the fuel it just burned. Once you burn it, it’s gone, you can’t get it back (million dollar idea: build a combustion engine with an after burner, or one that stores kinetic energy from wasted acceleration…). So when you accelerate and create momentum, and then hit your brakes or turn, you’ve just wasted all of that forward momentum that you had created. It’s quite literally a waste of fuel. Seems so obvious now.
So, with all that in mind, did it really make a difference?!? Let’s take a look.
Last night, May 11th, i filled my tank with 14.02 gallons of gas after travelling 384.8 miles…divide miles by gallons….carry the 1…i got 27.4 mpg. Defintitely not bad. Not bad at all…but it’s pretty close to my prior hypothesis.
I travelled 66 more miles on this tank and i filled up 2 days later than i normally would (allowing that i was out of town for 24 hours in the middle of that). If i fill up every 7 days for a year, keeping gas prices at $3.65/gallon and assuming that i buy 14 gallons per trip, that gets me a yearly gas bill of $2,044. If i fill up every 9 days, keeping the cost and quantity constant, my yearly gas bill would be $2,652. That’s not bad…i’m not sure saving $600 a year is enough to usually necessitate a behavior change for me, but in theory it sounds damn good. Seeing as though we’re getting a $600 “stimulus” check from our federal governement this year, maybe another $600 from saving some gas could really help the majority of this country out…i digress.
Environmentally speaking, here are the results…If i only have to fill up every 9 days instead of every 7, that would equate to 12 fewer trips to the pump per year (40, instead of 52). If i fill up 14 gallons at each of these trips, that would save 168 gallons of gas per year. Let’s say there are 200 million drivers in the U.S. If each of these drivers saved 168 gallons of gas per year that would be 33.6 billion gallons of gas saved. The U.S. consumes 146 billion gallons of gas per year…that would cut our consumption almost one-fourth…a pretty amazing number. And for fun, let’s take it another step. Assuming that a 42-gallon barrel of oil makes 19.5 gallons of gas (even though there is no standard for this)…that would reduce the demand for oil by about 72.2 billion gallons of oil per year. World consumption is around 120 million barrels a day or 43.8 billion barrels or 1.8 trillion gallons of oil per year…so if the U.S. managed to save 72 billion gallons of oil, not by driving electric cars or walking to work, but just by driving slower, we would reduce world oil consumption by 60%. (The world’s economy would fucking collapse, but that’s beside the point right?)
Pretty convincing numbers if you ask me. Color me surprised, but i actually am going to make an effort to drive slower and smarter. It’ll be good for my pocket book and good for the environment, while not having a huge impact on how i live my life. This is not a big or difficult change. I’m sure it will be easier on my car and definitely safer for myself and those around me.
Boston moms duke it out at Chuck E. Cheese. You stay classy New England.
Is it just me, or is nobody really worried about the price of oil right now as much as they should be?
Brett Favre retires…end of an era. (and a great reminder than Kevin still hasn’t paid me for winning Fantasy Football…)
Filed under: Exxon, Halliburton, Oil, Pinedale, greed, horror, money, power, status quo, wealth
I’m on my way home from Pinedale, Wyoming, where my family has had a cabin for 10 years now. It used to be an awesome escape to a little town of 1,200 that just built their first movie theater less than 5 years ago. But recently a huge natural gas deposit was found near our house and over the next 10 years, they will drill more than 10,000 wells and completely ruin my neighborhood, the hunting, fishing and quaint little small-town feeling. Actually, the small town feeling is already ruined.
See, when they do these things, they do environmental impact studies and they tell everyone that despite the ugliness of the wells, it’s really not going to hurt the land that much, the animals will be fine, etc. But they don’t talk about the impact on people. When you build that many wells, you need a ton of manpower and equipment. And when you bring hundreds of men into a town that doesn’t have hundreds of single women, you’re absolutely asking for trouble. Crime is up, violent crime is up. You don’t recognize people in town. It’s downright scary to go to what used to be friendly, neighborhood cowboy bars. May my town rest in peace.
But this wasn’t meant to be an indictment of the murder of small-town America, although we could certainly talk for days about that.
What struck me as interesting during my visit was all of the Halliburton vehicles driving around town. I guess what really caught me by surprise was my underestimation of the size of that company. They have vehicles and equipment being blown up in Iraq daily, they have contractors and employees being kidnapped, killed, beheaded and ambushed all the time and yet, on the other side of the world in Wyoming, it’s just business as usual.
And I’m trying to duplicate the conversation that I just had with my dad about it. And I can understand that it’s just so hard to wrap your brain around…after all that we’re taught in schools and we hear in the mainstream media, we try so hard to believe in the ideals of this country that this stuff couldn’t be true. But if you look at the facts on some of this stuff, it’s just shocking and overwhelming and completely frightening. It’s the feeling that no matter what we do, no matter how we vote or how we live, that we’re just completely outnumbered and basically, fucked. It’s a tough thing to realize that you really can’t do anything about it. It’s a horrible thing for me to say, but I honestly believe that what’s going on in this world is too big for us to stop. It’s out of our hands. Thanks for playing, please come again. The status quo is too entrenched, the wheels are already in motion.
The oil companies posted record breaking profits last year in the 10’s of billions of dollars. Exxon made $28 billion in profits alone. That’s not just revenue…that’s money they made above and beyond the massive expenses of that company. During that entire time, Americans were caught at the pumps complaining about gas prices. Now I’m a fan of the laws of economics, so I’m not saying that Exxon shouldn’t have priced competitively and made as much money as humanly possible, because that’s the idea behind business…you make as much as you can, when you can. But, what I am saying, is that when you look at those numbers, and you look at the people who stand to benefit from those numbers, it’s not a big surprise why we’re fighting where we are fighting and why we are willing to put up with death and destruction and human rights travesties and all the other byproducts of this war. Because the war is still profitable.
How many trucks does $28 billion in profits replace? How many pieces of equipment? How many lobbyists? How many government officials? How many soldiers and officers can be promised high-ranking security jobs after the war? How many terrorist attacks can you afford? (And that includes 9-11, because it cost a few thousand lives, 4 planes and a few really nice pieces of real estate. Add all that up and it was a fucking drop in the proverbial $28 billion dollar bucket. I hate to minimize that terrible event in monetary terms, but that’s what they’re doing, so for the sake of this argument, I must as well.) And most importantly, how many deaths does $28 billion in profits get you? It may make you sick to the very core of your stomach to think of death in terms of net cost, but that’s how those companies and this government is looking at it. It’s just the cost of doing business for them. It’s the reality of the situation that people are going to die. The companies (and we’ll go ahead and lump the government under the “company” umbrella from now on, because they are one.) will pay the families, express their pseudo-condolences, pretend on their faces that they’re actually upset and that something needs to be done, but in their minds, in their board rooms, in their corner offices, there is a chart, a cost-benefit analysis, a return-on-investment breakdown that puts a price on those lives and determines just how many they can lose before the profit dries up. And I don’t know if most of us even want to fathom that number. It’s high. If I had to guess, I’d say somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
When I had this conversation, the statement was made, “I have to believe that if there was a better way. If there was a renewable energy source, if there was a way to quench this thirst, a way to market new energies that would be cheaper, easier to use, better for our environment and would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make us safer, that we would do it.” And I can’t blame that person for making that statement. Because that thought is based in the ideals and the values that we’re all brought up with. We’ve read them in our textbooks, been told them by our parents, politicians and priests. We’ve bought into them, and none of us are at fault for wanting to believe that the people in power really are doing the best they possibly can to move America forward. But they’re not. Because there is no money in it.
There is very little doubt in my mind that the brilliant minds in this country have thought up and attempted to develop at least 50 different ways — if not more — to completely relieve our dependence on oil and I feel strongly that the oil companies, the power companies, the powers-that-be in this country didn’t hesitate a bit to buy that idea and bury it. Why wouldn’t they? The money is in the status quo. Always has been. For these companies, there is no benefit in them finding a new way to do it. You find me a company who has changed and adapted and grown into new technologies and new ways to do things; better, cleaner, healthier ways to do things and has stayed relevant over the last 50 years. It hasn’t happened. Sure, there have been plenty of companies in business that long, but they’re all still using the core ideas and philosophies of their original business. When someone finds something new and better, they don’t bring it up in an old company. They start (or buy) a new one. Google, Microsoft, Saturn, Gateway. All had a new idea, and did it themselves (and even now those companies are getting old and slow and they’re the ones buying the new ideas ie. Google buying YouTube). Research and development of new ideas takes forever, costs a lot and there’s no guarantee of any money in it. That’s a basic business tenet. So tell me what incentive Exxon, Shell, BP or Halliburton has to do it any different? None.
It’s absolutely easier and safer for them to maintain the status quo. Do you think the government is going to make them? They own the government, democrats and republicans alike. They own this war. Their bloody fingerprints are all over it.
The only reason America is in Iraq is to maintain that status quo. Those companies and this government — that they own and influence — is only in that country because there is a monetary interest in being there. Their return on investment will be so massive when Iraq settles down. And if it costs billions of dollars in equipment and thousands of lives, fine. I guarantee you it’ll be worth it financially to them. Would they like it to be all settled now? Sure, but I’d like my Microsoft stock to go through the roof right now. Will it? No, but I’m in for the long haul because it’s worth it. The only difference between them and me is the scale of it.
And if you think for a second that what I’ve said about ROI being the only reason we’re there, answer me this. Why don’t we have a standing army of 100,000+ in Darfur? How about in Somalia? Ghana? The Ivory Coast? The Congo? Russia? Why aren’t we there? The same things that happened in Iraq are happening in those places. Actually most of those places are definitively worse. (The people of Iraq were probably in less danger of dying horrifically before we got there to be honest. But that’s another blog, for another time.) But the bottom line is that we’re not in those other places because there’s not enough money to be made there. In the business world, they would say that those places carry a negative cost-benefit analysis.
What I’ve said is not hard to understand, it’s not radical and it’s not all that revolutionary. It’s basic business. It’s free trade. It’s the basis for all that we accept. And that’s the truly scary part.
