scott.hodson.blog

Oil is bad. No, I haven’t gone enviro-wacko. I’m just saying, we just have to stop using oil! For me the main reason is that high oil prices gives money to “petro-authoritarian” regimes (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, etc) which fund terrorists and other opponents to our way of life. So you might say, “OK Scott, what are my options? We have to get around.” And yes we do. Get a hybrid, OK, good start. But I find it disturbing to see that the tack our govt seems to be taking is to be funding “alternative fuels” such as ethanol, biodiesel, vegtable oil, wood chips, hydrogen, etc.

But I’m against these alternative, renewable, clean-burning fuels too. Why? Because alternative fuels still require lots of infrastructure to move the fuels around. Trucks, fuel stations, pipelines, refining plants, etc. These all create inefficiencies and provide choke points for those that control them to make huge profits at our expense. Imagine Exxon monopolizing hydrogen refineries. So forget about alternative fuels too.

What we need is electric cars! With electric cars there are almost no moving parts, so say goodbye to most auto mechanics and dealer service centers. With electric cars we just plug them in, there’s no “fuel station” to fill up at, we fill up at our house. That has tremendous implications. Think of all of the freed-up real estate that the elimination of most gas stations would provide. No more pipelines, no more tanker trucks clogging up the freeways, no more shortage of refineries driving up the price of fuel, no more oil spills, etc.

Now, of course we will never exterminate our need for combustible fuels. Large trucks, airplanes, trains, etc., they will likely need these sort of fuels for a long time in the future. And even though the upcoming electric cars such as Tesla Motors have a range of 250 miles on a single battery charge that still makes the occasional cross-country road trip pretty tough to pull-off. Nevertheless, 99% of our car use require much less than 250 miles of driving in a single day.

And all of this increased demand for electricity will be a challenge too. We will need to generate more electricity, hopefully cleanly and without using imported fuels. Nukes are better and safer than the ones built for us over 30 years ago. And with solar cell technology getting better and cheaper, we could conceivably charge our cars with solar power generated at our house off grid.

I hope we start having more electric choices available to us in the marketplace soon. In the meantime, every time I fill up the gas tank I wonder how much of that money is going towards funding Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hugo Chavez.

And, no, I haven’t watched Who Killed the Electric Car? and I don’t own a hybrid or electric car (yet) so go ahead and call me a hypocrite if you want.

UPDATE: I watched “Who Killed to Electric Car?”, great movie, rent it.

UPDATE: I’m now less of a fan of nuclear after reading how much energy it takes to mine the uranium nukes need and the mining disaster that is caused to the land and the amount of energy it takes to “clean up” the abandoned mine.

In case you haven’t heard, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, articulately desribes the reasons against Net Neutrality. He refers to the Internet as a set of “tubes” and that the whole Internet was sent to him, among other things. Maybe he was getting the Internet and the Alaska Pipeline confused.

Remmeber, this is the same guy that got over $453M of federal funds for bridges in Alaska including the famous “bridge to nowhere“.

Here is the full audio

Here are some excerpts:

• “I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.”
• “They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that? Do you know why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.”
• “Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.”

The political party you belong to, or not (Independents), may influence what kind of car you drive, according to this NY Times article. In summary:

Among their findings: buyers of American cars tend to be Republican - except, for some reason, those who buy Pontiacs, who tend to be Democrats. Foreign-brand compact cars are usually bought by Democrats - but not Mini Coopers, which are bought by almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And Volvos may not actually represent quite what you think.

This billboard off the 605 freeway is good timing considering what’s going on in D.C. this week and what’s moving through Congress.