Ken Nelson

These tips, from Popular Mechanics, work.   I’ve seen my Expedition get north of 20 using them on longer trips in mountainous areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Gas tips…

A slumping global economy cutting demand could lower gas prices by .75 cents this summer.

We hope. Sort of. Cause, gosh, doesn’t a slumping global economy sound bad too?

The basic problem with gas is that we don’t make enough of it. Nor do we extract enough oil. Nor do we make enough energy from nuclear (particularly thorium) sources. Nor do we invest efficiently to create massive new energy sources (i.e. thorium power). Instead we waste billions on wind farms, and solar stuff with terrible yields and delivery problems.

So, yet again, unproductive, politically driven spending is killing us.

Where is my mobile thorium battery that will power my large van longer than its frame will last?  Where is my household thorium unit that will power my place, and give me a bit extra to sell to my neighbors?  Why aren’t we deploying thorium units closer to consumption so we stop wasting gigawatts in transmission losses?

Nobody seems to be thinking big, or grand, in our energy schemes.

Energy = lifestyle.  Make MORE OF IT.

I’ll vote for the candidate, Democrat, Republican, Martian, that proposes a reasonable plan to quadruple our energy production this decade.

I’m not holding my breath.

Check out this talk on nuclear energy from thorium:

Learn more about it at energyfromthorium.com

So… would our 60 billion wasted on GM have been a better “investment” funding the powering of the world with thorium?  Or buying UAW votes and campaign donations?

Next time you think Obama is a visionary, stop. He’s just a bigger version of the same old same old.

Apparently the rise in gas prices corresponds most strongly (almost perfectly) to the drop in the value of the dollar:

Michael Pento, senior economist at Euro Pacific Capital in New York, says there is an almost perfect negative correlation between the falling dollar and oil prices—minus-0.9 to be exact.

"When you have negative correlations that strong, it’s not hard to understand that the reason why we’re having this price spike in commodities is primarily because of the weaker currency and not because of shortages of oil or international tensions or global growth," Pento says.

I say… why choose? Obama and his Democrats work every day to tighten supply. And they work night and day to make our money worth less.   Throw in a storm or two and $6.50 a gallon seems likely.

When will we have a government that recognizes that energy = quality of life?  And that works night and day to get us more of it?

Of course the end game might be that we just burn dollars in steam engines. There should be plenty or the worthless things around in the future.

Via  http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/116741/

Reader Andrew Medina says we’re lucky to face nuclear-plant problems, because if the tsunami had hit a solar farm instead, “10,000’s of Lbs of lead and cadmium telluride would have been swept into the Sea of Japan poisoning just about everything.”

I’m very pro nuclear, not in spite of what is happening in Japan, but because of it.

Via Instapundit…

10 Things You The Government Shouldn’t Do on Gas Prices

2. Don’t drag on drilling permits. As the only country in the world that places a majority of its territorial waters off-limits to oil and gas exploration, at the very least we should be drilling in the areas where we do have access. Removing the de facto moratorium on drilling would immediately increase supply, create jobs, and bring in royalty revenue to federal and state governments.

Guess what… Obama is 0 for 9 of them and is thinking hard about the 10th (releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve).

We couldn’t have elected a worse President for the problems facing us than the loser “leading” us now.

When we need honesty, he is dishonest. When we need more energy, he cuts production of it. When we need freedom he takes it away. When we need less corruption, he gives us more.

I can forgive people that were fooled into voting for this moron, but I can’t forgive or trust people that still think he is a good President.

Corruption personified.

Ethanol subsidies are up for renewal and are likely to be part of this bogus tax deal Obama and the Republicans are cooking up.

Why?  One Senator, Charles Grassley, from the state that gets most of the subsidies.

 
Bigger than any bank, but you didn’t know it was a bank

You may think British Petroleum is an oil company. And it is, sort of. What it really is is a finance company. It leverages its huge asset base (cash, cash flow, oil rights, physical assets) to get cheap credit that it then loans out to others at a higher price.

You didn’t know this?  Well, that is understandable. Do you think Obama and his crew know it? Or care?  They should. By trying to take down BP for their own political gain they could mess up  a precariously balanced, extremely leveraged,  and highly interconnected international finance system where BP is a major player in the 615 TRILLION dollar company to company finance market (also known as OTC or over-the-counter).

OTC is where the real work of global business happens. It is where money is loaned, risk managed, and profits made.

If trillions in BP backed financial instruments, such as derivatives, credit synthetic options, credit default swaps, and other global arbitrage instruments, fail the result could be a deleveraging and liquidity crisis that makes the Lehman Brothers event that precipitated billions in government bailouts look like a hot spring versus Krakatau.

For more on the risk BP financials threads pose, read this helpful article, Sultans of Swap, by Gordon Long.

You can ignore or take to heart his predictions. I find it useful to really know what BP is and why we need to tread carefully in what we impose on it.  This isn’t to say that companies can grow too big to be accountable, but with the good of large companies come plenty of risks. We can’t really have one without the other.

What I suggest is that Obama’s political skin isn’t worth, to the rest of us anyway, another, bigger, 2008 deleveraging event.

We can really only go one of two ways on these things. No controls, but make sure the players are playing with their money (not ours). OR do not permit these types of markets at all.  Government half regulating, 1/4 crony, and 1/4 witless cannot keep up with the pace and complexity of these markets that in many ways welcome regulation as just another thing they can arbitrage.

I favor letting them do their own thing, with their own money. They will learn to not dig holes they can’t climb out of if we aren’t there to bail them out.

A strong President that cared for America, the world, and wanted to improve it would do this.  Instead we have who we have.

Put another way, since there seems to be no end to the financial rape this Government wants to perform on its citizens, they COULD AT LEAST invest the money wisely.  Instead… we have who we have.

Via NASA

Here is a picture of the whole gulf:

BP sure screwed up but is trying to fix it. The Feds screwed up and are trying to use it.

Keith Hennesey lays out how easy it is to waive the Jones Act (he organized it twice during the Bush Administration) and let whatever ships want to help us with the oil spill help.

Jones Act waivers are in the news because of the Gulf oil spill.  I would like to contribute to that discussion by sharing my experiences coordinating the Jones Act waivers for President Bush in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  In 2005 I served as the Deputy at the White House National Economic Council.

Read it and this will make more sense.

At the heart of the issue with Obama’s administration is that he, and those he has placed in power, fundamentally don’t care about Americans. Obama cares about himself. And his staff and appointees care about precise causes or economic interests, and they just can’t seem to do anything well that isn’t in their area of focus. They are activists with agendas not managers with competence.

What incentive would an eco-kook who hates oil drilling have to stop this mess?  And what skills would they bring to the table?  Yet that is the sort of person the Administration put in charge of monitoring oil drilling.   BP made a boo-boo, but in doing so they are  highlighting just how foolish our government is.

"The U.S. government will become insolvent before BP does," said Bruce Lanni, a stock analyst with Nollenberg Capital Partners.

From this article.

If you factor in tax offsets, I suspect BP will end up whole, and the US government down quite a bit on this oil spill.

 
4500 feet too deep

Sarah Palin, correctly, says that radical environmentalists are hurting the environment they claim to love.

“Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country’s energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It’s catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.”

It would help, Sarah, to think of them not as caring about the environment, but as radical socialists concerned more with economic distribution and outcomes than with whales or other “natural” things.

In this way, btw, radical environmentalists are like radical ACLU types.  Radical enviro kooks threaten the environment, just as radical ACLU kooks are a large threat to liberty.

Little is actually what it is claimed to be in liberal la la land.

Some solar advocates put up a map of the small areas needed to be covered with solar panels to “power the world”:

I note with some dissatisfaction that my house is covered by a solar shield.  Their assumptions mysteriously are missing. I’m assuming, for instance, this is peak output. Does it include night time?  Does it include cloudy days?  Should all of the US suffer because St. George has thunderstorms for a few days?

Solar fanatics just don’t think things through.  I want nuclear plants that can be all over, generate lots of power, and ARE ALWAYS TURNED ON!

John Droz Jr. has an interesting presentation debunking renewable energy’s potential.

Although he is a PhD the presentation is geared towards non-scientific average citizens.

Read the whole thing… it is loaded with useful comparisons like this one: