Perhaps we should be finding ways of making more efficient or even electric SUV & light trucks. That's what a majority of Americans seem to want, especially in more rural areas.
I dearly love Arkansas (Greers Ferry, Buffalo river, Pinnacle Mt, Petit Jean, etc) and have no desire at all to see it sullied in any way. I'm also aware of Tyson chicken's ubiquity nationwide and their waste problem and how Blanche Lincoln is always trying to get a handout to clean up the mess they make in those beautiful parts. Just so you know, a lot of chicken and beef in Cali comes from Foster Farms (or Mexico). There's a giant feed lot on the I-5 between LA and SF. If chicken is an extra dollar a pound and Tyson cleans up its own mess, I could live with that.
But don't get me wrong. I'll gladly pay my contribution to the Universal Service Fund so that rural folks can get hooked in to the Internet Borg. That benefits me directly because I write software. It benefits those areas because it brings all the wisdom and madness of the world right home to small town people. It benefits anyone who does business online because your audience is wider and your profit potential is greater.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that petroleum is going to get more and more expensive. The growth of Southeast Asian economies is crazy. Chinese and Indian folks are starting to buy cars and their cars need gasoline. The days of cheap gas are gone and we should start embracing measures to steer our infrastructure and settlements toward a future where gas is double or triple its current cost. If you pile on top of that the environmental and geopolitical costs of petroleum, it seems pretty clear to me that we should be looking for ways to get around more efficiently and with alternative fuel sources. If you disagree, you are entitled to your opinion. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.
I think the point of population density is entirely relevant for two reasons: 1) Taxes revenues come from the populace -- people and business constituted of people. The less fewer you have, the less tax revenue you have to subsidize things. 2) The cost to run roads or fiber or wireless towers or train lines is proportional to the disance covered. The United States has over 25 times the land area of Japan.
A village of a couple hundred is a sizeable establishment relative to some US towns. In the US, you get towns with a handful of people that are quite remote. I've passed road signs in Arkansas that show populations less than 10 people. I think you and I would agree that providing a public transit line to such remote places as Supai, Arizona is a bad idea. If you are using Federal tax revenue to subsidize public transit, the question is naturally where to build it and how far to go.
I like your highly scientific and well-researched rejoinder.
But yes, I have seen an SUV almost flip over. There was a tiny blonde woman with no passengers talking on her phone. She wasn't paying attention and drifted into another lane. Someone in a much smaller car freaked out and honked and she corrected a little too hard. The big pillowy tires on the front of the SUV kind of dug in and one back wheel came off the ground. She corrected again, and the other back tire came off the ground. She managed to pull it out but very nearly flipped the thing. She then slowed down dramatically and as we passed her, she was white as a sheet.
You've never seen a Central Arkansas Transit bus. It's one of the saddest things you can see. And it's unfair to compare Japan with the United States because the US is vastly larger and much less sparsely populated. Japan: 338.5 people per square kilometer United States: 31.8 people per square kilometer.
Which reminds me of something. All these arguments about screwing over rural folks with gas taxes ignores the fact that we've been subsidizing rural folks with road building, electricity, and communications infrastructure for years. It costs more money to provide phone service in tiny rural towns than a phone company will ever make providing that phone service. If the plan is to treat everyone equally, then we would start by getting rid of the Universal Service Fund and rural highway projects funded by tax revenues from large urban centers.
You seem to have conveniently ignored the geopolitical aspect of excessive fuel consumption. And small cars need not be underpowered econoboxes. Have you ever driven a Mini Cooper or volkswagen GTI?
And I know what fungibility means. It means I can't exchange a self-indulgent, knuckle-headed, short-sighted, chump like you with an intelligent and responsible person who thinks about the future.
Well I don't have a TV and drink a cappucino maybe 5 times annually. And I'll admit I do love a good long shower or a stint in someone's hot tub*. I'll also admit that I have judgmental feelings toward people who drive large vehicles when they have no good reason to do so**. Good reasons are the need to (regularly) tow things or carry large amounts of gear, being large themselves, having lots of kids, etc. I can't argue with your economic decision it sounds like the same decision I would make if I needed a truck. I don't need a truck though. I drive an old Camry myself which gets 20-25MPG because I've got a lead foot and drive almost entirely in the city. I think your savings might be greater than you think. Assuming first one is driving 12,500 miles per year which is the nat'l average for cars and a whole lot more than I drive. The average for light trucks is even higher at 14,000 miles per year. Assuming second 25MPG for my car (which is optimistic it's more like 20 in practice) which has a 3.0L engine, that comes out to about 500 gallons of gas per year. Were I to drive an SUV with double the engine displacement and double the weight (let's assume they are actually towing 1500 lbs of something on average), I think halving the MPG to 12.5 MPG on average, thereby doubling the fuel consumption, would be a reasonable assumption. That's an extra 500 gallons of gas per year. Gas is typically $4 a gallon here in Los Angeles which would mean $2000 per year. The nat'll average for a gallon of gas is $2.80 a gallon which comes out to $1420 per year. Assuming you keep your car for 10 years, that's $14,200. Personally, I'd like to be putting $1,420 per year in an IRA.
If everyone in the US were to double their vehicle's fuel efficiency (an impossibility I know), then the amount of money we send overseas to import crude oil might be halved. Given that this was $300B last year, that would be a tremendous boon to our economy. We could keep half of that, meaning a $150B boon to our domestic economy.
* In the Southwest, wasting water is probably a bigger sin than wasting petroleum.
**Aside from economic, geopolitical and environmental concerns, my reasons for this judgmental attitude derive mostly from parking situations, crowded roads, getting crowded out of my lane, or being unable to see because one is looming right in front of me. Having taken a lot of physics in college, the inefficiency is also a primary source of irritation in its own right. I feel like there's a failure of imagination on the part of automotive engineers.
I think we would both agree the war on drugs doesn't really work. That's a very good example of how government gets it wrong in a very expensive way. I know everyone's gonna bash me as a liberal for saying it, but I tend to think addiction treatment and social programs would work better. Maybe we should decriminalize drugs, tax them and earmark the proceeds for addiction programs, needle exchanges, education, etc. God I sound like a pinko.
My father has an SUV and a boat. He hasn't laid eyes on the boat in years. He drives the gigantic SUV 5 miles to work every day. He doesn't put anything in it most days that wouldn't fit in a toyota yaris. He weighs a little over 200 lbs (only kinda fat). His car weighs 4500 lbs. Surely there is a more efficient way to get him to work with his blueprints and briefcase? I mean come on! We're probably wasting more than 99% of the energy used to get him there.
But yes there are folks who need a big truck. I share a conversion van with some friends of mine. We use it to cart music gear around. Can't haul 2000 lbs of speaker cabinets and amplifiers in a Yaris. But let me tell you it SUCKS to park that thing or drive in traffic.
I don't like your SUV. *You* get over it. I can't wait til gas is $10 a gallon. I'll enjoy thinking of you spending $300 to fill up your eyesore that blocks out the sun.
It's funny you mention AR. I grew up in Little Rock and went to Central High School (smack dab in one of those less-than-awesome neighborhoods). I think I rode CAT once. Maybe. And yes mass transit doesn't work well in sparsely populated areas like AR.
However, that doesn't mean everyone needs a giant car. If we all follow the i-need-a-bigger-car-because-bigger-cars-protect-me-better-in-collisions-with-other-vehicles mentality to its logical conclusion, we'll all be driving eighteen wheelers before too long. As I understand it, large and small cars with proper safety features fare about the same in a barrier collision (i.e., with an immovable object) but in car-vs-car collisions, the heavier car fares much better against a smaller car because they have more inertia and therefore decelerate less. If cars were generally smaller overall....blah blah blah.
I don't mind of well-behaved folks engage in a little drug use and tend to agree that the war on drugs is a failure. For serious addiction, I believe that treatment rather than prosecution is a cheaper way to handle the problem.
As for the gas tax, our opinions differ. We can leave it at that.
It's one thing to lose an individual to a ravaging addiction. It's another thing entirely to sink your whole country with one. I don't think that it's OK that the US consumes 23% of the world's Petroleum with only 4% of the world's population and that's why I used the addiction analogy which some folks have tried to stretch into an allegory. To plan your economic future on the premise of cheap petroleum always being available is a really bad idea. I think that's pretty obvious. Folks in China and India and elsewhere are finally getting cars. The price is going to go up.
His point that everyone would be upset by an increased gas tax is the part I take issue with. It doesn't upset me at all. On the contrary, I like the idea. In my reckoning, that point does not stand.
What I meant to say is that the addict usually resorts to crimes that hurt others (theft, violence etc.). But this is a red herring. Unless I know the addict, I don't care if s/he dies from the addiction. The US economy is another matter.
To summarize, the economic threat is that we spend over half a trillion a year on petroleum and more than half of that money goes to other countries. It's the primary reason for our trade deficit and will only get worse as oil gets more expensive. The geopolitical problem is that we give tens of billions of dollars annually to various countries that don't like us and, should we have to fight a war with them, it will take a lot of petroleum that they will no longer be selling to us.
Because junkies usually resort to criminal behavior when the habit gets the better of them. Although I would argue that the government doesn't really get involved here in the US. At least the LAPD don't seem to bother. Skidrow is covered with junkies.
The link you provided cites as it source the EIA which is the very site that I linked in my post. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Nickel-and-dime me all you like, the story is still gloomy. Here's more. The US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day -- almost a quarter of the world total. We spend roughly $522B each year on petroleum. More than half of our petroleum (58%) is imported. We send about $300B abroad each year to support this nasty habit. And the price is volatile! If the price per barrel stays at its current value which is over $100 per bbl, then we will be spending $700B and sending $400B abroad every year. That's a lot of treasure -- and I haven't factored in any costs for our wars which are arguably caused by our desire to insure oil supplies. Personally, I would like to see that $400B spent here at home.
As for my original point -- that we are sending a lot of money to some dodgy regimes -- here is some more detail. We import 5 million barrels per day from OPEC. We import 1.465 million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia alone. The average cost per barrel for crude oil is $74.71 per barrel. *Every single day*, that comes out to: $109,450,150 USD to Saudi Arabia ($40B/yr) $56,704,890 USD to Venezuela ($21B/yr) $39,521,590 to Nigeria ($14B/yr) $30,108,130 to Iraq ($11B/yr) Iran - none (my bad).
That paltry 16% of our oil imports from the Persian Gulf means we are sending $48B (16% of imports which are 58% of total 522B) to the Persian Gulf every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps we should be finding ways of making more efficient or even electric SUV & light trucks. That's what a majority of Americans seem to want, especially in more rural areas.
Amen to that.
I dearly love Arkansas (Greers Ferry, Buffalo river, Pinnacle Mt, Petit Jean, etc) and have no desire at all to see it sullied in any way. I'm also aware of Tyson chicken's ubiquity nationwide and their waste problem and how Blanche Lincoln is always trying to get a handout to clean up the mess they make in those beautiful parts. Just so you know, a lot of chicken and beef in Cali comes from Foster Farms (or Mexico). There's a giant feed lot on the I-5 between LA and SF. If chicken is an extra dollar a pound and Tyson cleans up its own mess, I could live with that.
But don't get me wrong. I'll gladly pay my contribution to the Universal Service Fund so that rural folks can get hooked in to the Internet Borg. That benefits me directly because I write software. It benefits those areas because it brings all the wisdom and madness of the world right home to small town people. It benefits anyone who does business online because your audience is wider and your profit potential is greater.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that petroleum is going to get more and more expensive. The growth of Southeast Asian economies is crazy. Chinese and Indian folks are starting to buy cars and their cars need gasoline. The days of cheap gas are gone and we should start embracing measures to steer our infrastructure and settlements toward a future where gas is double or triple its current cost. If you pile on top of that the environmental and geopolitical costs of petroleum, it seems pretty clear to me that we should be looking for ways to get around more efficiently and with alternative fuel sources. If you disagree, you are entitled to your opinion. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.
I think the point of population density is entirely relevant for two reasons:
1) Taxes revenues come from the populace -- people and business constituted of people. The less fewer you have, the less tax revenue you have to subsidize things.
2) The cost to run roads or fiber or wireless towers or train lines is proportional to the disance covered. The United States has over 25 times the land area of Japan.
A village of a couple hundred is a sizeable establishment relative to some US towns. In the US, you get towns with a handful of people that are quite remote. I've passed road signs in Arkansas that show populations less than 10 people. I think you and I would agree that providing a public transit line to such remote places as Supai, Arizona is a bad idea. If you are using Federal tax revenue to subsidize public transit, the question is naturally where to build it and how far to go.
Yeah I went to double check and attempted to correct my mistake in a second post.
My bad...it's not run by NASA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Camp
However, a friend of mine who works for NASA attended.
space camp! run by NASA.
I like your highly scientific and well-researched rejoinder.
But yes, I have seen an SUV almost flip over. There was a tiny blonde woman with no passengers talking on her phone. She wasn't paying attention and drifted into another lane. Someone in a much smaller car freaked out and honked and she corrected a little too hard. The big pillowy tires on the front of the SUV kind of dug in and one back wheel came off the ground. She corrected again, and the other back tire came off the ground. She managed to pull it out but very nearly flipped the thing. She then slowed down dramatically and as we passed her, she was white as a sheet.
You've never seen a Central Arkansas Transit bus. It's one of the saddest things you can see. And it's unfair to compare Japan with the United States because the US is vastly larger and much less sparsely populated.
Japan: 338.5 people per square kilometer
United States: 31.8 people per square kilometer.
Which reminds me of something. All these arguments about screwing over rural folks with gas taxes ignores the fact that we've been subsidizing rural folks with road building, electricity, and communications infrastructure for years. It costs more money to provide phone service in tiny rural towns than a phone company will ever make providing that phone service. If the plan is to treat everyone equally, then we would start by getting rid of the Universal Service Fund and rural highway projects funded by tax revenues from large urban centers.
You seem to have conveniently ignored the geopolitical aspect of excessive fuel consumption. And small cars need not be underpowered econoboxes. Have you ever driven a Mini Cooper or volkswagen GTI?
And I know what fungibility means. It means I can't exchange a self-indulgent, knuckle-headed, short-sighted, chump like you with an intelligent and responsible person who thinks about the future.
Well I don't have a TV and drink a cappucino maybe 5 times annually. And I'll admit I do love a good long shower or a stint in someone's hot tub*. I'll also admit that I have judgmental feelings toward people who drive large vehicles when they have no good reason to do so**. Good reasons are the need to (regularly) tow things or carry large amounts of gear, being large themselves, having lots of kids, etc. I can't argue with your economic decision it sounds like the same decision I would make if I needed a truck. I don't need a truck though. I drive an old Camry myself which gets 20-25MPG because I've got a lead foot and drive almost entirely in the city. I think your savings might be greater than you think. Assuming first one is driving 12,500 miles per year which is the nat'l average for cars and a whole lot more than I drive. The average for light trucks is even higher at 14,000 miles per year. Assuming second 25MPG for my car (which is optimistic it's more like 20 in practice) which has a 3.0L engine, that comes out to about 500 gallons of gas per year. Were I to drive an SUV with double the engine displacement and double the weight (let's assume they are actually towing 1500 lbs of something on average), I think halving the MPG to 12.5 MPG on average, thereby doubling the fuel consumption, would be a reasonable assumption. That's an extra 500 gallons of gas per year. Gas is typically $4 a gallon here in Los Angeles which would mean $2000 per year. The nat'll average for a gallon of gas is $2.80 a gallon which comes out to $1420 per year. Assuming you keep your car for 10 years, that's $14,200. Personally, I'd like to be putting $1,420 per year in an IRA.
If everyone in the US were to double their vehicle's fuel efficiency (an impossibility I know), then the amount of money we send overseas to import crude oil might be halved. Given that this was $300B last year, that would be a tremendous boon to our economy. We could keep half of that, meaning a $150B boon to our domestic economy.
* In the Southwest, wasting water is probably a bigger sin than wasting petroleum.
**Aside from economic, geopolitical and environmental concerns, my reasons for this judgmental attitude derive mostly from parking situations, crowded roads, getting crowded out of my lane, or being unable to see because one is looming right in front of me. Having taken a lot of physics in college, the inefficiency is also a primary source of irritation in its own right. I feel like there's a failure of imagination on the part of automotive engineers.
I think we would both agree the war on drugs doesn't really work. That's a very good example of how government gets it wrong in a very expensive way. I know everyone's gonna bash me as a liberal for saying it, but I tend to think addiction treatment and social programs would work better. Maybe we should decriminalize drugs, tax them and earmark the proceeds for addiction programs, needle exchanges, education, etc. God I sound like a pinko.
I know, I know. I hope in vain. Perhaps they'll earmark the gas tax money to maintain infrastructure or something. Grumble grumble.
My father has an SUV and a boat. He hasn't laid eyes on the boat in years. He drives the gigantic SUV 5 miles to work every day. He doesn't put anything in it most days that wouldn't fit in a toyota yaris. He weighs a little over 200 lbs (only kinda fat). His car weighs 4500 lbs. Surely there is a more efficient way to get him to work with his blueprints and briefcase? I mean come on! We're probably wasting more than 99% of the energy used to get him there.
But yes there are folks who need a big truck. I share a conversion van with some friends of mine. We use it to cart music gear around. Can't haul 2000 lbs of speaker cabinets and amplifiers in a Yaris. But let me tell you it SUCKS to park that thing or drive in traffic.
I don't like your SUV. *You* get over it. I can't wait til gas is $10 a gallon. I'll enjoy thinking of you spending $300 to fill up your eyesore that blocks out the sun.
It's funny you mention AR. I grew up in Little Rock and went to Central High School (smack dab in one of those less-than-awesome neighborhoods). I think I rode CAT once. Maybe. And yes mass transit doesn't work well in sparsely populated areas like AR.
However, that doesn't mean everyone needs a giant car. If we all follow the i-need-a-bigger-car-because-bigger-cars-protect-me-better-in-collisions-with-other-vehicles mentality to its logical conclusion, we'll all be driving eighteen wheelers before too long. As I understand it, large and small cars with proper safety features fare about the same in a barrier collision (i.e., with an immovable object) but in car-vs-car collisions, the heavier car fares much better against a smaller car because they have more inertia and therefore decelerate less. If cars were generally smaller overall....blah blah blah.
I don't mind of well-behaved folks engage in a little drug use and tend to agree that the war on drugs is a failure. For serious addiction, I believe that treatment rather than prosecution is a cheaper way to handle the problem.
As for the gas tax, our opinions differ. We can leave it at that.
It's one thing to lose an individual to a ravaging addiction. It's another thing entirely to sink your whole country with one. I don't think that it's OK that the US consumes 23% of the world's Petroleum with only 4% of the world's population and that's why I used the addiction analogy which some folks have tried to stretch into an allegory. To plan your economic future on the premise of cheap petroleum always being available is a really bad idea. I think that's pretty obvious. Folks in China and India and elsewhere are finally getting cars. The price is going to go up.
His point that everyone would be upset by an increased gas tax is the part I take issue with. It doesn't upset me at all. On the contrary, I like the idea. In my reckoning, that point does not stand.
What I meant to say is that the addict usually resorts to crimes that hurt others (theft, violence etc.). But this is a red herring. Unless I know the addict, I don't care if s/he dies from the addiction. The US economy is another matter.
See my other post:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2608246&cid=38617522
To summarize, the economic threat is that we spend over half a trillion a year on petroleum and more than half of that money goes to other countries. It's the primary reason for our trade deficit and will only get worse as oil gets more expensive. The geopolitical problem is that we give tens of billions of dollars annually to various countries that don't like us and, should we have to fight a war with them, it will take a lot of petroleum that they will no longer be selling to us.
Because junkies usually resort to criminal behavior when the habit gets the better of them. Although I would argue that the government doesn't really get involved here in the US. At least the LAPD don't seem to bother. Skidrow is covered with junkies.
Your forgot to account for self-righteous pricks lobbing pointless jokes from the peanut gallery.
The link you provided cites as it source the EIA which is the very site that I linked in my post. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Nickel-and-dime me all you like, the story is still gloomy. Here's more. The US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day -- almost a quarter of the world total. We spend roughly $522B each year on petroleum. More than half of our petroleum (58%) is imported. We send about $300B abroad each year to support this nasty habit. And the price is volatile! If the price per barrel stays at its current value which is over $100 per bbl, then we will be spending $700B and sending $400B abroad every year. That's a lot of treasure -- and I haven't factored in any costs for our wars which are arguably caused by our desire to insure oil supplies. Personally, I would like to see that $400B spent here at home.
As for my original point -- that we are sending a lot of money to some dodgy regimes -- here is some more detail. We import 5 million barrels per day from OPEC. We import 1.465 million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia alone. The average cost per barrel for crude oil is $74.71 per barrel. *Every single day*, that comes out to:
$109,450,150 USD to Saudi Arabia ($40B/yr)
$56,704,890 USD to Venezuela ($21B/yr)
$39,521,590 to Nigeria ($14B/yr)
$30,108,130 to Iraq ($11B/yr)
Iran - none (my bad).
That paltry 16% of our oil imports from the Persian Gulf means we are sending $48B (16% of imports which are 58% of total 522B) to the Persian Gulf every year.
And, if memory serves, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. So was Bin Laden. Have you been listening to Fox News? Tell the truth.
O RLY? It's true we get a lot from Canada and Mexico, but Saudi Arabia is right up there too.