Your hard-earned gas money at work

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true. what might be better is a publicity campaign to encourage people to at least be interested in alternative fuel sources and maybe spark some interest in pursuing alternative sources.

Well, an issue is what we should call infrastructure. My solution does not use government intervention in such an extensive role. Not as readily at all, your intervention demands a more careful hand, mine does not demand quite as much, as after all your idea leads to a more command based economic structure while mine tries to avoid that.

i would never want the government to be the one to dole out my energy...be it for my apartment or for my car.



i thought since your name was orwell that you'd be anti-big brother? literally giving them (literally) power on top of giving them legislative power is just insanity.

I'm not expressing myself very well... oh well, I'll try again. Both our solutions attempt to change the cost discrepancy between gasoline and other sources of energy because we view it as desirable to reduce our use of oil. Yours does so by making gasoline more expensive, mine by making other sources cheaper. Which provides the smoother transition for our economy? Yes, the issue with my argument would be what exactly counts as infrastructure. Energy at the very least is required for transportation, which I suppose would technically make it a complement to much of our infrastructure. As I said, nuclear power isn't really possible outside of government promotion of it, and I think nuclear is probably one of our more appealing options. Yes, mine requires a little more care, but it also comes out with better results in that it doesn't require years of recurrent energy crises to resolve the issue.

I wouldn't really classify it as command structure, I want subsidization rather than outright government ownership in most cases. After all, aren't subsidies just negative taxes? If so, I fail to see all that much difference between our two solutions except for where we are aiming our efforts.

Every time someone disagrees with me, they try to play the "What would Orwell do?" card. It gets pretty old. Anyways, I don't want the government doling out your energy, I just want there to be more investment in developing nuclear and other sources of energy, rather than punishing the country as a whole for using gasoline and pushing up prices until we're forced to come up with new solutions. Feasible solutions are already available, they just need relatively high initial investments to get them running. What's the readiest source of large amounts of money for such a project? The government. I'm normally opposed to government intervention, but here I see a need for it.

BTW, Orwell was a socialist. I'm sure he would have been cool with government involvement in the energy crisis.

well then i misunderstood your point.

i still tend to think that the government would be a bad place to look for advancements. i think something like the x-prize would be better. it gets better publicity and while it doesn't reward much in the angle of money put in vs awarded, the publicity and noise it makes helps spur innovation and competition.

Not really looking for advancements, nuclear power plants are old enough news that the basics of the design are covered in nearly every introductory physics and chemistry book. Hydrogen power also doesn't need a whole ton of advancements, feasible fuel cell-powered cars had been worked out as early as the late 1980s. The issue is that our infrastructure is built around gas-powered vehicles and it requires a lot of money and initial investment to get these other technologies started in the marketplace.

Publicity is one thing, but that will just result in Chevy trotting out one of the hydrogen cars they've already built, throwing a press conference, and continuing to sell cars running off of internal combustion of fossil fuels. The issue is to increase use of these vehicles as compared to petroleum-driven ones, and to do that you need to make it easier for the consumer to use them. That includes promoting their manufacture and helping to develop the infrastructure needed to support them.

Well, there is a major difference. You have to pick the right things to subsidize, I only select certain things for taxation based upon their costs. To be honest, I agree with Sargon for the most part, except I am promoting a government solution to gasoline based externalities. The issue of nuclear power may be an issue for the government, but that is an issue of changing local power supplies and less of a national issue in some ways.

Well, you have to select the right things to tax at higher or lower rates, which leads to the same public choice problem as subsidies. Both our solutions face that problem. Really now, you don't actually think local governments are going to be setting up nuclear power plants anytime soon? I don't know if that would even be permitted, after all, most independent nations aren't permitted to enrich uranium. Though I would support individual states doing a lot of this stuff, but at some point you have to acknowledge that they aren't going to do anything and look somewhere else. Also, your solution simply will not happen. You really think gasoline is going to be heavily taxed when so many of our politicians are tied to big oil? And subsidies to government-favored industries will continue regardless of whether government steps in to help solve our energy problem. I say we should go ahead and help nuclear and hydrogen as large-scale energy sources get started. Otherwise there's going to have to be some really nasty shocks in the energy market before we switch to newer technology.

I know you would most favor the "do nothing" approach Sargon advocated, but I don't think that one will work out too well.

Are you Anti-Nuclear or something??? I sure hope those hysterical Hippie-Ass EcoFags havent influenced you with ther PSEUDO-scientific ant-nuclear BS hysteria. BTW folks, Angola has got PLENTY of oil and they are well outside the Arab/Islamic sphere of influence so WHY the Hell dont American oil companies go there? The Iraq war has done Nothing to increase oil exports from Iraq to the US-in fact its done quite the OPPOSITE! If Oil companies are going to profit than God Damnit! I want cheap Gas, NOW!! ! ENOUGH of this price-gauging because of anticipations of HYPOTHETICAL shortages which have no basis in Reality! There is PLENTY of oil coming out of the Middle East so I guess the laissez-fair approach isnt working so well, huh .
I have read and heard of undersea oil resevoires beneath the continental shelf off the west coast. If we have offshore platforms in the gulf WHY not off the pacific coast?

Nuclear power, it turns out is really the ONLY economical way to supply the electricity to generate enough Hydrogen(via electrolysis of water)to meet the demand for a "Hydrogen Economy". Turns out though that there WILL need to be more R&D to develop jetliners that use (liquid)hydrogen fuel instead of Kerocene. That is, unless you wanna go back the propellor age and used fuel-cell driven prop planes instead .

Wasn't really considering airplanes in this discussion, but I suppose research into liquid-fuel jets would be in order. NASA seems the right organization to oversee that. We were mainly talking about cars though, and for those fuel cells are a much better choice than internal combustion, whether of gasoline or ethanol. And electric batteries aren't feasible for a variety of reasons.

Yes, I know nuclear is the most effective means of generating hydrogen for fuel cells. That's why I've been promoting it this whole time.

I wonder what it will take to circumvent and/or override the Insane anti-nuclear lobby so that the Nuclear Industry can be revived........

I dunno... so many people still hear "nuclear power" and think "OMG WE'LL HAVE ANOTHER CHERNOBYL AND ALL DIE!! !" when in reality a repeat of Chernobyl isn't even possible with American nuclear designs- the Soviets sucked at designing power plants, and even with one of the worst imaginable designs, it STILL required some massive screw-ups to cause the disaster it did.

Nuclear power is clean and safe. Once people realize that, we can deal with the energy crisis.

Hydrogen also has some of the same stigma around it... I occasionally hear someone argue against fuel cells with an allusion to the Hindenberg... which is just a load of bull for so many reasons.

Most gas tax proposals I've heard involve cutting income tax at the same time. The idea isn't so much a tax grab as moving the existing taxes around so that they curb gas consumption.

And I have to say, higher gas prices HAVE been shown to equal out in the long run. Europe has had higher gas prices for a long time, and car manufacturers have responded by creating more gas-efficient cars.

I also find the 'let the free market decide' very strange, since frankly gas prices are already distorted. When people are buying gas, they are NOT paying the full price, simply what it takes to drill, process, transport, and store it. It leaves out the costs paid by the governement to protect supply, hold prices low via subsidy, clean up the enviromental damage, and hedge against the future diminishment of supply. See the link below.

Real Cost of Gas

The other problem with just letting the free market decide is that it costs a lot of money to create the infrasturcture needed to make an alternative system financially viable. In the case of hydrogen, you'd have to create the manufacturing plants for splitting the water (most like many small ones as opposed to several big ones - hydrogen doesn't travel or store well) and install hydrogen fuelling stations so people can refuel their cars.

But doing this won't make money, because no one has any hydrogen powered cars. However, no company is going to start producing hydrogen powered cars until there is enough of a customer demand. And how many people are going to buy a car they can't drive, because no-one is providing any fuel for it? It's a Catch-22.

Unless the government were to take initiative to create the initial infrastructure, I don't see how this will ever get off the ground. There is precedent; how do you think we got the road system needed to make cars a viable product in the first place?

Transporting liquid Hydrogen would be done in a very similar way that liquid nitrogen is transported; it Can be done!
Many small electrolysis plants would have to have their OWN designated electrical supply otherwise they would suck up WAY too much power from the grid. I would most certainly be FAR more efficient to have one large electrolysis plant with its OWN powerplant-specifically a single-reactor used to boil the water into steam-driven turbines and Then the excess steam would be pumped to the ajacent electrolysis plant. But first I think its more practical to start with using hydrogen to power airplanes Before we switch to using hydrogen for fuel-cell driven land vehicles.