Harry Reid and Snake Oil

After listening to the re-run on C-Span of Senator Harry Reid’s speech at the Democratic National Convention presented on Wednesday evening, I was glad that I missed the original presentation since I was preparing and eating my supper. There’s something about Harry Reid that seems to always slightly nauseate me and seeing his speech before supper would have spoiled my appetite.

Listening to Harry Reid mention snake oil convinced me that he was certainly an expert on the subject.

While he was describing the traits of a presidential administration, I could have sworn he was referring to Lyndon Johnson instead of George Bush. His description of the administration was certainly more characteristic of and consistent with Johnson’s.

When Reid chided the Republicans for ridiculing Jimmy Carter alternative energy initiatives, I couldn’t fail to wonder why, if the ideas were considered so great at the time, that a Democratic president couldn’t get a Democratically controlled Congress to go along with his ideas. There must have been more of a problem than the Republicans.

Harry Reid apparently considers oil some sort of demon. He’s quick to point out that any current oil drilling will take 10 years to be productive, a point, by the way which isn’t exactly correct when people who are familiar with oil drilling are asked about the prospects. The fact that he and Boone Pickens keep pointing to regarding the United States having only 3% of the world’s known oil reserves are based on relatively old data, may not take into account discovery of large deposits of oil in deeper parts of the Gulf of Mexico late last summer and completely disregard the fact that Congress has prohibited exploration to seek out new oil deposits in many parts of the Gulf and in nearly all of the areas of the eastern and western continental shelves. In other words, while numerous new deposits of oil have been discovered in many parts of the world in the past 10 years, oil companies have been prohibited from doing the same exploration and development in American controlled waters. New oil deposits have been discovered in Indonesia and Brazil in the past 10 years helping those countries to become energy independent and to develop their economies while the United States has been limited to importing increasing amounts of oil.

While France has been safely using nuclear energy for the past 50 plus years, a Democratically controlled congress has prohibited the United States from building new nuclear reactors for nearly 30 years.

Harry Reid ridicules the prospect of producing more oil because he says it will take 10 years. How long will it take to develop and implement an alternative energy source consisting of wind and solar power? He fails to mention that those prospects are 12 to 22 years in the future. In a recent presentation before a Congressional committee an expert on offshore wind development stated it would take 5 to 7 years for the technology to be perfected. And that estimate didn’t include the time it would take to implement the technology once it had been developed. It’s understandable that the Democratic leadership might be unaware of these facts since no Democrats even attended the hearing.

Pickens Plan Presentation Before Senate Committee

Harry Reid’s speech amounted to a lot of hot air and political posturing based of questionably lofty ideals with no substance. He ridicules any attempt to try to achieve any form of energy independence through developing any oil resources we may have by discounting it stating that any increase in domestic oil supplies would take 10 years. Yet he doesn’t explain what the American people are supposed to do in the intervening 12 to 22 years while solar and wind power are being developed.

Harry Reid talks of energy conservation. Where are the examples from the Democratic leadership … or do they believe in leading by example? And where is the explanation of what the American people are supposed to do while waiting to be delivered from Harry’s Demon? Where are all of those electric cars and the cars that get 40 miles per gallon that the Democrats keep alluding to? Are they going to spontaneously appear once Obama becomes president?

Harry Reid’s simple-minded tunnel vision would be a riotous joke if his unadulterated hypocricy weren’t nauseatingly revolting.

One thing became obvious after listening to Harry Reid. It really doesn’t matter whether Nancy Pelosi has given an indication that offshore drilling might be a possibility … because Harry Reid hasn’t. Pelosi can play all of the politics she wants by letting it leak that she has given permission for Democratic Congressmen up for re-election to tell their constituents that they’re in favor of offshore drilling. Pelosi says, “Tell your constituents anything it takes to get re-elected.”

Because, if Pelosi doesn’t continue to block any bills regarding offshore oil exploration and drilling, Harry Reid will.

Frankly, they don’t care what 70% of the American public wants. After all, they’re Democrats and they know better than the American public what’s good for America.

Pickens Plan Presentation Before Senate Committee

On 22 July 2008 Boone Pickens presented his energy plan before the Senate Homeland Security Committee chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman (I) of Connecticut. The hearing was requested by Senator Susan Collins (R) of Maine and telecast on C-Span with a rebroadcast late night 22 July or early morning on 23 July.

I caught the rebroadcast early Wednesday morning missing the first part of Mr. Pickens presentation but heard about 20 or 30 minutes of it. To me, the essence of Mr Pickens’ initiative is to convert the mass of U.S. transportation from gasoline to natural gas, especially heavy transportation, and the development of wind power throughout the heartland, from Texas into the Dakotas, with the potential of developing as much as 400 gigawats of electrical energy. In addition to these proposals, he had a plan for developing the infrastructure to carry the newly developed energy source. Of note, he pointed out that natural gas provides power that alcohol based fuels cannot, i.e., horsepower. His natural gas proposal seemed to me most realistically aimed at the current non-rail freight transport system in the country today … aimed at decreasing our dependency on foreign oil in the transportation sector, primarily commercial, by 38%. When asked, he estimated that the cost for developing this wind power would be about $500 billion with an additional $100 billion for infrastructure. He pointed out that this was still less than the current estimate ($700 billion) of the cost of oil imports for one year at the current price of crude oil. Mr. Pickens pointed out that known natural gas reserves within the United States have doubled in the last 10 years.

The second speaker was Gal Luft of the Institute for Analysis of Global Security. He pointed out that 2008 would be the first year that the United States will pay to foreign countries more than we pay our military to protect us. He challenged Mr. Pickens plan which is based partially on natural gas, stating that the United States is currently a minor producer of natural gas with only (?) 4% of the known natural gas reserves in the world. He stated that several natural gas producing nations with most of the known reserves are currently forming a natural gas cartel and that the United States would only be substituting an oil based problem for a natural gas based one. I don’t know if he’s taken into account the increase in known natural gas reserves that Mr. Pickens alluded to. Mr. Luft also pointed out that OPEC is essentially producing the same amount of oil that it was producing 35 years ago, that the 65% increase in oil production in the past 35 years has been accomplished by non-OPEC nations. He stated that OPEC has historically decreased its production as the United States has increased its production.

Mr. Luft’s proposed solution was the implementation of flex-fuel cars, able to use gasoline, ethanol and methanol (GEM). He further stated that the cost of adding the flex-fuel capacity to American autos would be about $100. Apparently, there is currently a bill before Congress that would make the flex-fuel requirement law with 50% of autos sold in the U. S. being required to have the flex-fuel capacity and 80% by 2015. He stressed that this was part of an “open fuel standard” which would allow market forces to lower and dictate the cost of fuel through competitive pricing.

The third speaker was Geoffrey Anderson of Smart Growth America. His presentation was on the future development of “walkable communities” as opposed to “drive only communities”. Basically, what he was referring to was the fact that the past century’s residential development had been geared to the development and widespread use of the automible as the primary means of transportation … to the point that most residential developments were based on the necessity of the automobile to reach required services. One fact he presented was that currently only 11% of school children walked to school as compared to 50% in 1960. He discussed a “walkable community which had been developed in Atlanta, GA. It was anticipated that the residents in that community would only drive an average of 27 miles per day compared to the typical (?) 34 miles per day that the average Atlantan drove. They found that the average resident of that community actually drove only 9 miles per day, 1/3 of their estimate. A “walkable community is one where nearly all essential services and many nonessential services are within walking distance of the resident’s home. He envisioned “walkable communities” interconnected by convenient forms of mass transportation.

The last speaker was Dr. Habib Dagher, the director of the Advanced Structure and Composites Laboratory at the University of Maine. He spoke on the development of offshore wind power and stressed the acute need for that development by the residents of Maine because of the dramatically increasing cost of fuel oil which has been paralleling the cost of crude oil. He stated that the average cost of fuel oil for the average Maine household was projected to be about $5,000 this coming winter accounting for about 25% of that household’s annual budget. He presented a map that showed three primary areas where offshore wind power could be developed … off the northern Atlantic coast, in the Great Lakes region and off most of the Pacific coast. He addressed some considerations regarding wind variability and power storage. He did admit that it would probably take five to seven years to actually begin deployment of this power source. The potential energy production for each of these regions ranged from 150 to 400 gigawatts, similar to as well as complimentary to Mr. Pickens proposal, but, as he pointed out, closer to population densities with less infrastructure requirements. He did state that all of their proposed wind generators would be located greater than 20 miles offshore … over the horizon … out of sight, Senator Kennedy … and at greater cost. I did find it interesting that he completely avoided referring to the Cape Cod area as well as the mountains in southeastern Maine as well as those in New Hampshire Vermont and western North Carolina. But he was talking only about offshore, wasn’t he?

As both Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman pointed out, all of these proposals seemed to be complimentary.

Watching nearly all of the proceedings, I was acutely aware of the similarities ( sans wind power) of the “walkable community” proposal to the small community where I grew up in middle Georgia. There were four small towns in the county ranging in size from 500 to 3500. Practically all essential services were to be found within each community or within the county. The longest distance between the towns was about 19 miles and all were interconnected by rail as well as highway. It was actually possible to travel from one town to another by rail although, by the time I came along in the 1950’s, commuter rail was already being killed by a pro-union Democratic congress more interested in subsidizing automobile use with the development of the Interstate Highway System under the guise of national defense as well as its obvious subsidization of air travel through federal control and support of airports and air traffic control.

One thing that did strike me about the hearing was the total lack of even one Democratic senator’s presence during the nearly one and one half hours that I viewed. Another thing that stuck me was that the “Massachusetts Situation” was alluded to or tiptoed around. Nantucket Sound was specifically mentioned and, therefore, Senator Ted Kennedy’s obstruction of that project was alluded to.

Frankly, it sounds like we need to back up at least 50 years … or more like 100 years … in the transportation realm … and try again. I once read that modernization didn’t always equate to progress … or something like that.

Postscript: It’s now 4:53 am and I’m watching the beginning of the third broadcast of T. Boone Pickens’ presentation. As I suspected, there doesn’t appear to be even one Democratic senator who has shown Mr. Pickens the courtesy of listening to his presentation. And least I forget, as well as to be fair, only three Republican members were present. What a bunch of … buttheads!

Roll Call:

Present:

Joseph Lieberman (I), chairman

Susan Collins (R), co-chairman

George V. Voinovich (R), OH

Pete V. Domineci (R), NM

———-

Absent: (The Roll Call of Shame) …

Carl Levin (D), MI

Ted Stevens (R), AK

Daniel K. Akaka, (D), HI

Thomas R. Carper (D), DE

Norm Coleman (R), MN

Mark L. Pryor (D), AR

Tom Coleman (R), OK

Mary L. Landrieu (D), LA

Barack Obama (D), IL

John Warner (R), VA

Claire McCaskill (D), MO

John E. Sununu (R), NH

Jon Tester (D), MT