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White House Explains Transport-Energy Future
blair1q writes "Today on the White House Blog, the President (ok, his staff) released an infographic showing various facts about transportation energy, and how current gas prices need not be so worrisome. Highlights include rapidly increasing domestic production and rapidly decreasing prices for electric-car batteries, requesting Congress to shift tax breaks from oil producers to wind/solar/geothermal energy producers, and increasing domestic oil production (yes, there's a conflict there)."
When we make the handoff, I double back, grab one of 'em and beat it out of him! Huh?
If you're not confused, you're not paying attention
If you magically shifted to 100% domestic production overnight, at the current burn rate of 20 million barrels a day, the known reserves of 20 billion barrels would be all gone in 1000 days. Also known as "about 3 years". All gone forever. So be careful what you wish for.
How do we expect to continue increasing oil production when he's not approving permits? The fact is, people are not going to be able to afford heating oil and gas for their home this winter.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The amount of energy you get out compared to the amount you put in.
Oil from Saudi huge. Oil from Canada, not so much.
The lower EROEI is, the larger the proportion of the economy must be dedicated to energy production.
Deleted
Lets get tax credits for every mile that we ride on a bicycle. That should help solve these problems. Mark
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
And then charge us for how many miles we drive because gas consumption decreases. As discussed yesterday. Move us to clean energy and then tax the wind.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
I don't see anything in the graphic about urban planning. If they incentivized development near light rail hubs and discouraged car-dependant suburban development it would do a lot.
First, there's the carrot of new development projects. There's the houses themselves, and the light rail. Secondly, don't tax the suburbs as that would be very unpopular and counterproductive. Instead, simply give Federal money to jurisdictions based on their ability to reduce non-walkable development. This would reduce the *supply* of this type of development. Buyers who still want 0.25 acres of grass and a 5 mile drive to the store would see their home values increase due to the supply side effect.
Done right, we could kill two birds with one stone: The real estate slump, and gasoline consumption.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe not the best energy plan, but better than "bomb the crap out of Iraq".
'Cause that hasn't worked out as well as I had hoped.
I never thought I'd see a President pretty much ACTUALLY SAY THAT.
Obama's an amalgam of the worst of Jimmy Carter, Bush I, and Bush II.
Does that mean we're going to be lucky enough to have Hope and Change limited to four years?
If the commodities speculators weren't running amok, the price of gas (and every other commodity) would come down. I read somewhere recently that oil speculators add $.70 to the price of a gallon of gas at the pump.
I just want to put it out there that this energy crises that we are having has as much to do with our habits as it does with the conflict in the middle east. We are stuck in a rut with our large cars. How many of you can fill up for under $40 and have that last for the month. We need start to drive smaller cars. You will find that your wallet will stop hurting as much.
Im not saying that we all have to go out and buy a hybrid or electric vehicle. I would caution against it. It is still expensive to manufacture those batteries and i dont think that the technology isn't there yet. Wait a few years.
Just as a tip for saving money, don't drive as much. Carpool, dust off that old bike in your garage, take the bus or train, even walk. These are all alternate modes of transportation and are a lot cheaper then driving. I personally make the effort to ride my bike more miles then I drive in a week and as a result i can fill up about once a month.
There are no "tax handouts" to the oil companies. Oil companies can depreciate their oilfield assets just like any industrial company can depreciate long-term tangible investments (factories, mines, etc). That's all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If the tax breaks are eliminated, or decreased, before we are fully prepared with alternative energy sources what do you think will happen. We will pay the difference at the pump, is my opinion.
...as soon as Obama's High Speed Bus Plan gets put into place!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I didn't see anything in his presentation about the rare earth minerals that are (currently) needed to produce all of those "green" electric cars. Does the US have enough rare earth reserves to put all of these cars on the road, or will we be dependent on China?
First, we already know from various scientific papers, that you can use wind energy to provide power for full scale freight trains in Canada, using fuel cell engines, and do so while reducing both carbon emissions and particulate pollution. Economies of scale kick in, you just split the H20 into fuel cell engine components at the wind farms along the route, which also allows you to handle the variable nature of wind.
Second, it supposes that our insane blockade of Cuba and other countries cane ethanol will continue, and that we will continue to divert corn food/feed crops to ethanol with massive farm and energy subsidies that are unsustainable - the most anti-capitalist thing we could be doing.
Third, it assumes that our country won't shift from using mostly air travel (high energy) to rail travel along the dense urban corridors in the East, South, and West. It also ignores Boeing's and SA's and Airbus higher mpg planes and jets and the use of turboprops and algae/switchgrass biodiesel to get twice the air miles using mostly alternative non-oil-based jet and turboprop fuels.
It is an insane plan written by deadenders who fail to understand that the world has already changed, and that all our exports and imports already have a carbon tax imposed on them - when we sell to NZ, Australia, Canada, Mexico, South America, and the EU we get charged for our lack of a carbon tax and end up paying a higher amount of taxes on the exports - and the imports already have a carbon tax built into them, which we don't get a refund for, since we lack a carbon tax.
EPIC FAIL.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Detailed here:
1) oil depletion allowance, [which is only available to smaller, independent companies, not "big oil"]
2) expensing indirect drilling costs, [which is an accelerated expensing schedule. It changes the timing of expense writeoffs, not the amount.] and
3) a tax credit for taxes paid to foreign nations during foreign operations (foreign tax credit) [which every multinational company gets, not just oil companies.]
When you hear about oil company "subsidies", this is what they're talking about.
This is the biggest piece of propaganda crap I have seen from the US government in a long time. They're telling us that century-old energy should still be used because of some shitty evidence and the reasoning of a drunk toddler. Talk about depressing. Basically, they're simply advertising their anti-science stance.
You want to know why Skynet took over the world and tried to blow it up? You would too if you saw how bloody stupid the US government is.
I like the fact they post that the more efficient mileage will save $3000 over the life of the car. So I should spend $15000 more than I just spent so I can save $3000. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
BTW, I went from car that averaged 30 mpg to one that averages 20. I enjoy having 300hp vs 130hp, and not having car payments.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
If Obama's energy strategy doesn't involve tax handouts to the oil companies and shortsighted environmental rules then I don't support it.
Of course, I'm retarded so I was probably going to vote for a Republican anyway...
The retards (or if you want to be polite, the misled) are the ones who keep supporting this Democrat-Republican duopoly that's gotten us nowhere, eroded liberty, and steadily run the nation into the ground for the last several decades. They don't even pretend to be our servants anymore.
Granted, it's a masterpiece of social engineering because it exploits a few simple principles without trying to be overly elaborate. It's classic divide-and-conquer: get the voters bickering over relatively trivial issues, each "side" thinking the other "side" is a bunch of morons who don't understand the facts, meanwhile all of the important decisions are made by the corporatocracy which can afford media campaigns, lobbyists, and real representation. It exploits the baser facets of human nature that date back to our hunter-gatherer days: members of my group good, outsiders bad, us against them. Isn't it funny how the status quo never really changes, it just becomes more so, just moves farther down the path it's already on? This is why.
Here's the failure of basing an educational system on memorization and authority instead of principle and discovery: most people would recognize why a duopoly with a stranglehold on an entire market is undesirable, why it guarantees that customers get screwed. Those same people need to have it pointed out to them that a duopoly with a strangehold on the entire political process is worse, that with money and power the stakes are higher than with money alone, that the voters get screwed quite badly.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Speculation does not exist in a magic vacuum. For every point speculated for higher prices, there's essentially someone else who speculated a point for lower prices. You can't make a bet with no one, you need someone to take that bet.
Don't believe the excuse of the day meant to distract from the government's failures.
If you want to lower price, think taxes. Direct taxes on gas average 50 cents per gallon. On top of that, the oil companies are heavily taxed, Exxon alone paid over $26 billion last year in taxes, half its profits. Who pays corporate income tax in the end? You do, by paying more for that corporation's products.
Of course, I'm retarded so I was probably going to vote for a Republican anyway...
Why are such childish arguments usually made by those attacking Republicans? I wonder if it's simply the age disparity; kids tend to be liberal, adults conservative.
It still floors me how far we've come in the last 20 years in the computer industry. By comparison, we should be beam-me-up-Scotty teleporting by now, or at least running 1000% more efficient than 30MPG. Gee, I wonder which one of the greedy fuckers in the oil industry is paying off anyone and everyone to keep all that technology under wraps.
Oh, and nice collection of industry-stifling patents you got there too...
So how do I parse these "liberal guys" from CATO, published in Forbes, saying that oil and gas firms get special tax breaks?
Or this guy over at The Volokh Conspiracy claiming that:
Because, I wouldn't want to look dumb and uneducated, thereby hurting my claim.
$ perl -p -e 's/liberal/OTHERGUY/g; s/conservative/liberal/g; s/OTHERGUY/conservative/g;'
Hey don't let facts get in the way of a good liberal rant. If you backup their claims with facts they will look dumb and uneducated. Thus hurt their primary claim that I am liberal because I am smarter then the conservatives.
Hey don't let facts get in the way of a good conservative rant. If you backup their claims with facts they will look dumb and uneducated. Thus hurt their primary claim that I am conservative because I am smarter then the liberals.
Kids can't vote so I don't believe you are correct on that one.
I got my Leaf a few weeks ago, and that graphic looks like it came right off the Leaf customer web site (where you login to see all the data the Leaf uploads about energy usage etc, "Carwings"): the colors, the style, the fonts.
Not that I disagree with it...just sayin'...
about prices when they exceeded $3 and nearly had a cow when they were at $4.
Just wow.
They don't concern themselves with current gas prices; watch this change in months leading to the election; because it doesn't fit their model. See, we, the public are too ignorant, too stupid, etc, to do what is right so those who are obviously much smarter than us have to "hurt" us because they love us so much, even though we don't really deserve it.
The sad part is, the people who propose policies rarely would ever adhere to them for their personal consumption. Thats for the little people, leaders need exceptions to rules and laws to be effective, y'know, after all they are so much better and smarter.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What's retarded is that we can be virtually assured any new strategy will be devoid of meaningful investment in viable alternative fuels.
We might see more good money thrown after bad (ethanol) but we aren't going to see a Manhattan/Apollo project around cheap full electric vehicles and corresponding upgrades to the power grid, which is what we really need.
I can currently fill up my tank for about $40 (9 gallons * $4.20 or so a gallon.) With my Prius (which apparently i shouldn't have bought) that gets me about 400 miles a tank, which lasts me around two weeks.
Now i certainly could get that down to one refill a week if i tried some alternate forms of transportation. Let's see, the commute to work is definitely well over half of my fuel usage so i'd have to start there. I don't have a bike, but if i was willing to buy one and learn how to use it Google maps says i could get to work in.... a little over an hour and a half (although the suggested route is two hours for some reason.) Okay, scratch that, how about public transit? Google says... two hours and ten minutes.
So if i wanted to save $40 a month in gas i could spend over three hours a day biking or over four hours a day riding the bus. I actually had to do the bus thing for a week or two between when my old car got totaled and when i bought the Prius. It really sucked. And even if that wasn't far longer than i'm willing to spend on my commute google says the bus fare would come to $5 each way, and from what i can tell getting a pass would cost more than $40 a month.
I could move closer, but it would be hard to find anyplace as cheap where i'm living now that was closer, and anyways any distance i cut off my commute would just lengthen my girlfriend's commute by a similar amount, providing a net gain of nothing.
I'm obviously not in the best situation for alternate forms of transit, but i don't think i'm in the worst case either. If you want large numbers of people to use public transit or bike we'd have to entirely restructure our cities or actually spend money on building more public transit. As it is i'm saving far more money from having switched to the kind of electric/hybrid car you say isn't worth it than i would from the alternatives you do suggest.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
sounds like your city needs mass transit!
U.S. oil production is down 43% from what it was forty years ago. U.S. production is LONG past peak, and the small increase of only 55 million bl/yr in the past two or three years -- no doubt the result of massive investment from when oil was at $140/bl in 2008 -- has only made up about 4% of the amount it has dropped since then.
Source: Energy Information Administration
Pffft! Facts! You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Saw this recently:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/02/environmental-fixes-all-greens-lost
Article goes on a bit, but the point seems to be expectations of a mad-max style scenario may be misplaced.
A Human Right
great, you geeks complained about the fortune at the bottom of the page being stuck, now it looks like spam! Is this the result of Taco & co's ham-handed attempt at fixing the fortune, or has /. been h@xx0r3d ?!
Accepting as fact that oil reserves are finite, we should be importing more, not less. The reserves will be more valuable later. When the Arab oil runs dry, they can buy oil from us at a much higher price based on the scarcity. If there were only two canteens available for a hike across the desert, would your policy be to consume your own canteen of water first?
Gently reply
The graphic says electricity generated today is 40% "clean energy". With a number that high I assume they are including nuclear and natural gas power plants, hydroelectric, etc.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I notice a lot of the comments here are getting modded up for putting down this plan. Here's my question: if you don't like the plan, what are your qualifications and how much time did you spend studying the problem?
The current Secretary of Energy is a Nobel Laureate and it's his job to make these plans. Is the claim that he's incorrect or purposefully lying to us?
Kids can't vote so I don't believe you are correct on that one.
Kids these days are kids until they're in their late 20's. I kid you not.
The rest goes to other pet projects. The federal gas tax revenue is a classic source for pork funding. I doubt the states are much more concerned with spending the money where it's supposed to be spent, on roads.
And that doesn't count the other built-in taxes that go straight to fund the spending sprees of the politicians.
Only because you are now in your 30s or 40s. People have been saying that crap since we have kept records. Let us remember Socrates was put to death for corrupting the youth.
So the President is trumpeting the creation of jobs through the use of Gov't grants? The matching grants make the transmissions Allison makes cost significantly less, because the taxpayer is GIVING Allison free money to make them cheaper - what happens when we stop giving Allison free money? Will their transmissions be competitive then?
Giving companies free money subverts the market, causes companies to do things that otherwise wouldn't make economic sense, and the companies will stop the activity once the subsidies end and they must bear the full cost.
Take a look at all the subsidies the Gov't is heaping on buyers of hybrids, and now add to that the subsidies the hybrid manufacturers are getting and you see quickly that they make no economic sense - if they did, the subsidies wouldn't be needed.
Ken
Why the fuck do oil producers get tax breaks? Apart from the fact that their puppets (Bush père and Bush fils) ran the show for so many years.
Mod Parent ROFLMAO +42 Funny
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It's a long screed. The relevant part is the first paragraph in his linked post. His claim is that "taxes kill infrastructure" because FDR subsidized auto companies at the expense of rail.
The auto corporations lobbied the government. That's what killed the rails, not taxes. These Libertarians would have you blame government for the fact that government is corrupted by corporations!
The answer is not to play into the corporation's hands, but to build a bulwark against further corporate influence, before they dismantle the only thing that has ever defended us against them.
If they have their way, we'll be back to unlimited workweeks, no minimum wage, no pollution controls, etc.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Burmashave
apparently you think resources are infinite. good luck with that.
all the easily accessible, cheap energy has been found. most of that has already been consumed. the rest is slow to access and requires an increasing amount of energy to extract. some of it will never be practical to extract. who cares if there's energy someplace if it takes more energy and resources to extract than it provides?
look at the geometric growth of both population and oil consumption over the past 100 years. is that growth sustainable? we need only look at the correlation between Egypt's uprising and its transition from net oil exporter to importer just to cover domestic demand.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7425
at some point even if the entire earth were comprised of oil we will have burned through it all.
is it reasonable to argue that peak oil is a bit further out than now? sure. but you seem to be arguing that oil/gas/coal are infinite in supply.
you also neglect the incentive our leaders have to lie to us and give us reassurances that there are tons of reserves out there to maintain social order. e.g. recently released US diplomatic cables from the wikileaks trove rather dispute your assertions regarding reserves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Let me guess what their explanation will be:
Fill out form 843784B part 3 section 7 through 22, send 2 copies to IPSEC, 3 to UWVHEW and PRQNGD. 3 to 6 weeks later you should receive form 36253-18C which will allow you to request form 67434C or 748346D depending on if your vehicle is covered under article 167538P section 12P article 6 through 8. Fill out those forms (original only, copies not permitted), and submit them to the proper authority (Energy Rehabilitation and Reversible Vacuum Cleaner Magnets Division of the Preliminary Supplementary Fuel Escrow Department, or the Millennium Department of Supplemental Ecology Infrastructure, depending on the Geological Division Code of your Elementary Motivational; Synergistic Division Inspector). 6 to 12 weeks later, you will receive your accessory coupon which will permit you to purchase one gallon of eco-fiendly corn based ethanol from an alternative fuel depot, usually within 300 miles of your state capital.
When the stock market crashed in October of 1929, Herbert Hoover was in office. Other than the notable exception of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, his response to the Great Depression was for the most part to do nothing and let the economy take care of itself. He refused to run a budget deficit, and didn't use federal money to stimulate the economy. In fact, he was such a deficit hawk that he ended up raising taxes in order to keep the budget balanced with declining revenues.
FDR was inaugurated March 4, 1933, and by this time the economy was a complete basket case. This was over three years and three months after the market crash of 1929, so your suggestion that FDR's policies turned a small correction into the Great Depression is simply wrong. The US was already three years into the depression, and Hoover's relative inaction, which for the most part would have made today's Ann Rand acolytes happy, clearly didn't allow the economy to heal itself as you suggest.
How disappointing. Production is not the problem, consumption is. Here's how to get energy under control: use less of it!
We've known for a very long time that the most cost-effective way to have the energy we need for the future is through conservation. Insulate houses. Replace windows. Use mass transit. As much as Republicans may hate it, President Carter was exactly right.
It's extremely disappointing to see the administration push hybrid/electric cars without making even more of a push for investment in transit infrastructure. The savings of $3000 over the life of a car with better mileage is dwarfed by the savings one gets from riding a bus or (even better) rail. The payoff for investment in public transit has been shown to be 7:1. For every dollar spent, $7 are returned in the form of efficiency, economic development and reduced congestion.
You pay me for services rendered $1,000 which you would think I would use to cover rent.
But instead I blow $500 on booze and hookers.
Now I need to borrow $500 to make my rent.
Such is the government's way, except I get screwed by a bunch of old politicians instead a hooker.
How disappointing. Production is not the problem, consumption is. Here's how to get energy under control: use less of it!
We've known for a very long time that the most cost-effective way to have the energy we need for the future is through conservation. Insulate houses. Replace windows. Use mass transit. As much as Republicans may hate it, President Carter was exactly right.
It's extremely disappointing to see the administration push hybrid/electric cars without making even more of a push for investment in transit infrastructure. The savings of $3000 over the life of a car with better mileage is dwarfed by the savings one gets from riding a bus or (even better) rail. The payoff for investment in public transit has been shown to be 7:1. For every dollar spent, $7 are returned in the form of efficiency, economic development and reduced congestion.
corrupting with butt sex!
If you are desperate for power build breeder reactors, subways and electric street cars. That will eliminate 1/2 the oil imports and drive down oil prices world wide. It would buy you time to do something.
> kids tend to be liberal, adults conservative.
Unless you're an X'er, in which case the roles were broadly reversed. We were diehard Republicans in high school and college, then started drifting into the moderate-Democrat closet in the early years of the 21st Century (embarrassed to admit it, but privately horrified by the freak show that just keeps getting weirder in the Big Republican Tent as the formerly-liberal Boomers crash the Party to keep their retirement funds safe, and Teaparty Hipsters start drifting in who haven't quite figured out that there's a difference between *warning* about a future "day of reckoning", vs doing your best to expedite its arrival and make it as bad as it can possibly be by intentionally forcing the federal government to default).
This was the president who said he wished gas prices had not risen to quickly. His energy secretary once lamented that we need European level gas prices in the United States. This is why. They want to push America to other sources as opposed to letting them come naturally. Get used to high prices and unemployment if you vote this mental dwarf back into office.
If you happen to be green, vegan, non-mainstream media watcher/reader, you might have heard, that animal farming causes more CO2 than all the cars on this planet. Also it causes a significant amount of pollution, and uses a lot of water and energy.
Do I know exact numbers? No,
Question: how is this not getting addressed at all, ever, and how is transportation energy/cost/pollution always taking the publicity? Is it because the above facts are not facts/true, or is it because of something else, like politics/lobbying/etc?
I do not mean this as flamebait, I am really just baffled by this happening. And yes, I am a tree-hugger in many ways..
they are efficient. There is lots of already laid railroad track. Why must it be used just for tugging business shit?
We have another brilliant video from Dr Jonica Newby - this time about Electric Cars.
http://sufiy.blogspot.com/2011/05/lithium-drive-video-electric-cars.html
make it as bad as it can possibly be by intentionally forcing the federal government to default
The federal government has already defaulted, back during the Nixon administration. They won't give you a troy ounce of gold for 32 dollars anymore.
as per the usual procedure, the powers that be, in form of the brainwashed population made sure, that the real information about economic situation is hidden away from the eyes of the public.
You can't handle the truth.
1. below market, or even interest free, loans
2. construction bonds for new drilling sites
3. the feds assuming liability for new exploration
And then there are more indirect subsidies
1. the federal interstate system (imagine how much less oil would be needed without that money being spent)
2. miitary costs for escorting tankers through pirate infested waters
3. cleanup costs for superfund sites and other poluted grounds (how much did the feds pay for BP's spill last year alone)
if there's a conflict perhaps you should have explained? domestic production helps to WEEN us off of foreign production which we heavily rely on. so the people who still NEED gas like those who can't afford a new electric car won't be charged an arm and a leg, plus the incentive is there to make it CHEAPER to provide people with electric cars. sounds like a plan to me.
... written by some guy named John who doesn't cite the sources for his assertions. They are merely his personal opinions. Here is a better rundown of the subsidies. And John, they aren't "subsidies", they are *subsidies*. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/2011-Budget-Fossil-Fuels.cfm
If you're unsure about what that is, read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserves-to-production_ratio
For statistics on the RtP rates see slide nr. 6 of this presentation by BP: http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2010_downloads/statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_report_slidepack_2010.ppt
You will note that the RtP rate remained approximately constant over the past 14-15 years. Now if you look at the price of oil (page 12 of the presentation), you'll notice a fairly steep price increase, except for the jolt caused by the 2008 banking crisis. This means that oil, whilst still *available* is getting more difficult (and hence expensive) to produce. If you factor in that the rate of consumption is growing and the rate of discovery of new sources is not, you'll see the problem.
Now, panicking (preceded of followed by running out) is not recommended, but neither is cultivating an "Oh but there's still oil aplenty" attitude.
Current trends of production and consumption all but guarantee continued high (and perhaps even higher) prices.
Now how can I state that in a way that is close to your heart? Ah yes. Let's put it this way: expect gasoline prices and your energy bills based on burning oil or gas to continue to rise in the next 20 years as they did in the past 10 years.
That means that alternative (especially renewable) energy sources definitely merit our attention, despite the increase in proven reserves.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/swedish-skeptics-confirm-nuclear-process-in-tiny-4-7-kw-reactor
http://www.nanosolar.com/power-plants/technology-advantages
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!). So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Dude, the tax on a gallon of gas figures up front in the cost for that gallon. Second, any increase in tax on a corporation, or denial of an existing subsidy, raises the price of the product they sell. It's true for tomatoes and it's true for gasoline. Corporations squeal when taxes are raised, despite the fact that such costs are passed on, because higher prices cause consumers to pay less.
Whether consumers pay less because they don't drive to the country to buy farm fresh produce ( costing rural counties needed revenue ) or by downloading cheap gas finder apps and thus diverting revenue from large employers to the equivalent of 'Homes of the Stars' map salesmen, the end result is a drag on the economy. The time spent finding gas deals or paying for ways to accommodate high gas prices is an indirect cost on the economy.
What we now know, thanks to the 'Cash for Clunkers' program, is that given additional subsidies consumers still want cars that provide them value that Prii and SmartCars don't offer. Most of the cars bought under 'Cash for Clunkers' were trucks, SUVs, or other non-Hybrids. You cannot incentivize out of reality.
Lastly, despite all of the weird talk about eliminating subsidies 'for' oil and gas companies, no one has identified any special subsidy these companies receive that every other mineral extraction firm gets. Put another way, by removing these subsidies we would be singling out and penalizing the companies that power our economy. That would be like flagellating ourselves every time we eat food. It solves nothing, causes unnecessary pain, and gets in the way of normal everyday life.