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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)."
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
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"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States
134 billion barrels known, just requires more work/legislation to get at some of it. So 18 years. Still, your children would get to experience a Mad-Max style collapse of civilization.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
Lets get tax credits for every mile that we ride on a bicycle. That should help solve these problems.
Mark
Already done since 2009: http://www.bikeleague.org/news/100708faq.php
Ask your employer about it!
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.
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.
Oil shale is the Thunderdome of oil production: two barrels of oil go into making one come out.
-Masterblaster!
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.
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.
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
Someone modded this down to -1 but honestly, I'd like an answer to this question myself. It really is a simple question. It's also a legitimate question. Answering a legitimate question would be much more respectable than modding it down and hoping it goes away like an insecure person. So, is anyone of the Progressive persuasion willing to put numbers to this?
Of course, I say that knowing that in politics you don't advance your career by actually solving problems so that they aren't problems anymore. There's not much "political capital" to be gained in coming up with solutions, particularly not practical and relatively simple solutions that don't require the creation of new bureaus to perpetually administer. But I'm not a politician and neither is anyone who is likely to respond, so I am hoping to receive a real answer here that I won't see in the media anytime soon.
What I want is for someone who truly believes in Progressivism to attempt a real answer at this question, even if you sincerely feel that no politician is adequately representing your position: at what point would you be satisfied and feel that you have gotten everything you wanted with regard to the tax code?
I usually try not to be this blunt but it's appropriate this time: anyone who knee-jerks and feels an overwhelming temptation to respond with something like "but the other party did so and so" should frankly shut up because the adults are talking. Tired of wading through the "us against them" noise whenever a serious question is asked.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's also not including the fact that the known global reserves keeps growing, not declining, despite our huge rate of consumption. In 1920, the world estimate was 60 billion barrels of reserves. In 1950, 600 billion barrels. From 1970 to 1990, estimates increased from 1,500 to 2,000 billion barrels. In 1994, the USGS estimated world reserves at 2,400 billion barrels. In 2000, the same estimate was raised to 3,000 barrels. Note that these estimates are not limited to "proved reserves" and only cover conventional crude. In short, we've been finding conventional crude faster than we've been taking it out of the ground, and faster than we've been expecting to find it -- at least in the long term.
There's a lot of distortion about oil reserves from the doomer crowd. For example, doomers love to point to graphs like this:
Link
Dear god! Run out and panic, right? Well, no. This graph is about as distorting as a graph can get. It's all based on backloading data. For each field, its current proven size is marked at the point in time when the field was discovered. What that should tell you is that regardless of however the actual rate of oil discoveries, you'd expect that shape on the graph! Oil fields aren't suddenly proven at their maximum capacity they're discovered. An oil field isn't proven until you start to produce from it, and there are even supergiants out there that we haven't started producing from yet. And the proven size continues to grow as you expand and explore the field. So for example, Ghawar, when it was first discovered in 1948, it was estimated to have "billions" of barrels. This grew to "60 billion barrels" in the 1970s. It's now produced 65 billion, and is estimated at 100 billion. Graphs like this backload that whole 100 billion to the 1940s.
It's trivially easy to disprove graphs like this. Let's just list some of the more noteworthy discoveries of the past decade or so. Jack 2 (3-15B), Noxal (~10B), Azadegan (~42B), Ferdows/Mound/Zagheh (~38B), Sugar Loaf (~25-40B), Tupi(5-8B), Jupiter(5-8B), West Kamchatka (10.3B), Tahe (29B), Jidong Nanpu (7.5B; potentially 146 in all of Bohai Bay), Kashagan (9-13B), and on and on. See those on the graph? But I guarantee you that a graph like that made a few decades from now will have them all conveniently showing up for this point in time.
There's this notion that "the biggest fields are found first, then everything else goes on the decline". Really? The US drilled its first well in 1859. It took us another 109 years to find Prudhoe Bay. And today we've got the absurdly massive Bakken field looming which back in the 1970s was assumed to be small and impossible to extract (Elm Coulee has proven otherwise). The same can be pointed to all over the world. Just simply pointing to Ghawar is not a counterexample. Look at coal; a single subsea coal deposit found off Norway in 2005 more than triples the world's known coal reserves. Or natural gas -- Israel has spent pretty much its whole existence in a vain search for sizeable deposits of oil or natural gas, only to hit the motherlode last year. How is this sort of thing possible? Simple. New exploration tech beats the pants off old exploration tech; new production tech makes far more things that used to be unviable, viable; there's always more "down" (especially with advancing technology); and most of the world haven't even been surveyed at all or has been only poorly surveyed -- sometimes even in known oil-rich areas (a good example of this is Iraq, which due to decades of war and sanctions is poorly explored and has just been living off its earlier finds).
Hubbert Peaks are the epitamy of fitting a particular curve to whatever arbitrary dataset you want (sometimes by hand) and the insisting that it matches. The US is a popular one, but the best-fit curve for the US is closer to a poisson than a normal (the US oil production
That last paragraph contained spoilers, so if you don't want spoilers go back and don't have read it.
It's impossible to get cheaper prices by increasing prices (taxing imports). With the current rate of monetary expansion it's impossible for oil prices to go down. Unless the dollar stops falling in value we won't be getting cheap oil anytime soon.
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.
Obama administration approves fourth Gulf deepwater drilling permit
They do, actually. If you come up negative, the tax return you receive after filing is greater than the sum total of income taxes you paid that year. Though technically they probably won't cut you a check. In most cases they will deposit the money electronically into your account. So maybe that was your point?
Jests aside, it's a form of welfare though we strongly prefer not to call it that. It'd be easier for us all to admit that there's something seriously wrong with our economic system if mass media openly acknowledged that some 40% or more of all adults are receiving a type of federal welfare. Most people who work for a living, pay their bills, etc. would like to feel independent, and would not like to think of themselves as welfare recipients.
A more neutral (though also loaded) term would be "redistribution of wealth". Euphemisms like that help keep the average person from realizing that we're seriously doing something wrong. That, in turn, preserves the status quo and that seems to be the only thing that matters to the people who run the show.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Someone modded this down to -1 but honestly, I'd like an answer to this question myself. It really is a simple question. It's also a legitimate question. Answering a legitimate question would be much more respectable than modding it down and hoping it goes away like an insecure person. So, is anyone of the Progressive persuasion willing to put numbers to this?
It was posted AC. They are guilty until proven innocent as far as trolling is concerned.
What I want is for someone who truly believes in Progressivism to attempt a real answer at this question, even if you sincerely feel that no politician is adequately representing your position: at what point would you be satisfied and feel that you have gotten everything you wanted with regard to the tax code?
I believe in income redistribution when it comes to the tax code. Let me get that out right up front. Globalization has been very good to the United States. I have not seen any economists argue that we should have or should now economically isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. But, the middle class and lower class has not benefited from Globalization. All the money and power has gone to the Upper-Middle and Upper classes. That is why income inequality is so high in this country. In the 60s and 70s, the difference between a CEO salary and the average worker salary was something like 20:1 or 30:1. Now it is somewhere around 300:1. They are getting most of the benefits from our system of government. Why should they not shoulder the higher tax burden?
My view of the "American Dream" is that it should not matter where you start in life. If you are the best, smartest, and hardest working then you should be able to become one of the richest. And you can measure this by measuring Intergenerational Mobility. And you find that the US ranks pretty low on the list. If you are rich in the US, then your descendants probably will be as well, no matter how stupid or lazy they are.
The tax system that I would theoretically like to have (though would have no idea the best way to actually implement it) would be one that aims to have a income distribution in the population (most likely would be a poisson distribution). If the rich are getting richer, and the middle class is getting left behind, then the rich should be taxed more (relatively). If there are not enough poor people, then the middle class should be taxed more (relatively). I am leaving out of the discussion how much taxes we should aim to collect. I am positing a system that stays revenue neutral. Now, I still want poor people. I think that we should build in opportunities for them to make something of themselves, but I still want people to be motivated to work knowing that if they don't their life will be uncomfortable. But, I also want the working man to have the incentive to work real hard, knowing that a few rich families at the top do not have a monopoly on real wealth. I do not want to assign an arbitrary tax percentage that is "enough". It is enough when it makes this a better country.
Also, I want to correct the previous post. The 40% do not "not only pay no taxes but actually get credits". They get a credit on their federal income taxes. They still pay FICA taxes (medicare and social security) which account for 15% if you count what the employer has to "match". They also pay sales taxes, possible state income taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, and whatever other taxes there are. I would also like to point out that those taxes tend to be regressive taxes. So, as a percentage of income, the middle class and below pays a much higher amount of tax than the upper class does.
I hope that was the kind of response you were asking for.
all the easily accessible, cheap energy has been found
Rei posted some real facts to the contrary. You reply by just blindy asserting this - is this a religion to you or something? Cause this reads so much like the posts asserting the evolution must be BS.
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.
Rei is arguing that for all of human history the "oil peak" has moved out by more than one year per year. That's a simple, checkable fact. That's not saying it will never come, only that there's no data about when it wil come.
The "oil peak" isn't necessarily a problem - eventually there will be some source of power so cheap that no one would dream of using oil for power. The interesting question is whether a marvelous new power source is invented before or after the ultimate limit on the oil supply matters. One thing's for sure the more expensive oil becomes, the more motivation there is to fins/use somehting better. The solution to high commodity prices has and always will be high commodity proces.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Still, your children would get to experience a Mad-Max style collapse of civilization."
Just move to Detroit and beat the crowd!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
At he height of of our prosperity, the top marginal tax rate varied from about 70% to about 90%. I feel about 50% is fair, and I also support a new bracket beginning at somewhere between $500,000 to $1 million annually to which the 50% marginal rate would apply. Moreover, Social Security contributions should not be capped. Spending should then be reduced below revenues until the debt is paid off.
I've seen a lot of things, but I've never been a witness.
I personally am not worried so much about how much oil is left. I'm worried about the pattern we're in with respect to it. It's polluting our planet and causing wars, regardless of the amount you say exists worldwide. I'm hoping we can get nuclear fusion working. Cheap, nearly unlimited energy would be a huge boon to all of us. Except the oil companies in the short run, but even they would benefit, taken as a collective of individuals.
Actually, it's your oil companies that are investing the most in other forms of energy. These guys know that as soon as a "better" form of energy is found, they are out of business. If they are the ones to discover this new form of energy, they put their competitors out of business.
I know everyone likes to call the "oil companies" or "big oil", but the fact is, these are "energy companies". Oil just happens to offer the best profit margin right now. If cars and plants start to run on milk, oil companies will gladly become dairy farmers.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.