Category Archives: Energy Party

A “garnet-red teardrop falling from the cheek of the future…”

Dan Neil won the Pulitzer in 2004 for his automotive column in the L.A. Times, and you can see why in his piece earlier this year about Honda’s hydrogen car, the FCX Clarity. A colleague shared it with me today, and I just had to share it with y’all — both in the interests of promoting talk about hydrogen and alternative fuels, and just to celebrate the words. A sample:

Perhaps obscured by questions of practicality and cost is the fact — and it is a fact — that the FCX Clarity is the most beautiful car to ever wear the big H on the nose. It’s just gorgeous, a big garnet-red teardrop falling from the cheek of the future, a sweet stanza of robot-written poetry.

You might be able to infer from that passage that Mr. Neil was essentially trashing the practicality of hydrogen elsewhere in his piece. His objections ranged from the general — the energy cost of producing hydrogen to start with — to the specific, which in this case involves pointing out that each one of these little beauties costs Honda $2 million to make. He reckons that a large part of Honda’s motivation is simply to reach California’s quota for emission-free cars sold by 2014.

But not entirely. As he acknowledges, Honda is learning some practical lessons from this exercise. Mr. Neil argues that the future is more likely to involve plug-in electrics (and I find that persuasive, which is why I’m anxious for Detroit to start mass-producing the affordable electrics it already knows how to make, and for clean nuclear plants to start popping up to power them). But Honda is learning a lot about how to better make those from making these:

The second reason Honda might have had for building the FCX Clarity: Nothing invested in this project goes to waste. The car’s state-of-the-art fuel cell can be amortized in Honda’s portable power generation division (the company makes awesome generators). And since a fuel-cell vehicle is essentially an electric vehicle with a hydrogen heart, all the technology — the glossy aerodynamics; the powerful, quiet and compact 100 kW (134 hp) electric motor; the new space-saving coaxial gearbox — can be rolled into future electric and plug-in electric projects.

And it has loads of interior space and a huge trunk.

Me, I’m all for efforts such as Honda’s, and if it takes a little utopian prodding from California to make it happen, then great. The Left Coast has gotta be good for something, right? What I generally hear from hydrogen experts is that automobiles are unlikely to be the most practical application, but they do dramatize the possibilities. And you learn from trying to build them.

Beyond that, I’m reminded of something I learned at Rotary Monday. Our speaker was the manager of the new Starbucks roasting plant in Sandy Run. He explained why Starbucks uses only arabica beans grown above 4,000 feet — such conditions make the plant work harder to grow and produce “cherries,” and that makes the coffee better.

The harder we push on hydrogen and every other promising source of power other than oil from countries run by tyrants, the better the result is going to be. So we need to keep pushing. In California, that means making “unreasonable, impractical” demands on automakers. (And maybe it will soon mean the same thing in Washington, with the gummint taking a big role in running Detroit.) And in South Carolina, it means continuing to push to be at the fore of hydrogen and alternative fuel research.

Just for fun, while we’re on the subject, here’s a link to one of my most popular videos ever, the one I shot in Five Points on St. Patrick’s Day 2007, the critically acclaimed “Who Resurrected the Electric Car?”

So Obama WON’T be the Energy Party president

Remember last year when I wrote about the fact that, although I really liked both Barack Obama and John McCain, unfortunately neither of them measured up to Energy Party standards? Well, I did, whether you remember it or not:

JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are lucky there’s such a thing as Republicans and Democrats in this country, because neither would be able to get the Energy Party nomination.

Well, I wish I’d been wrong, but I was (yet again) right. I can’t help it; it’s like a curse.

Just as the last administration was too focused on “drill, baby, drill” and wanted nothing to do with conservation and little to do with alternative sources, the Obama administration is looking like a typical, old-school, Democratic “no-nukes,” we-can-do-it-all-with-wind-and-solar bunch of ideologues.

At least, I get that impression from this release I got yesterday from Lindsey Graham:

FERC Chairman Says U.S. May Not Need Any More Nuclear or Coal Power Plants
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today responded to the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Jon Wellinghoff, who said our nation may not need to construct any new coal or nuclear power plants.  Wellinghoff deemed nuclear energy “too expensive” and said he saw no need to build coal or new nuclear power plants to meet future electricity needs.
Wellinghoff was named Chairman of FERC, the agency that oversees wholesale electric transactions and interstate electric transmission and gas transportation in the United States, by President Barack Obama on March 19, 2009.
Graham said:
“I’m afraid if we follow his advice we may be marching into darkness.
“To suggest a few sources of alternative energy alone could handle our future energy needs — in place of new nuclear or coal plants — defies reality.  I support capitalizing on all of our energy options, including deploying more alternative sources of energy.  However, the public is ill-served when someone in such a prominent position suggests alternative energy programs are developed and in such a state that we should abandon our plans to build more plants.  How the Chairman of FERC arrived at such a conclusion — and one which really no one else has arrived at – is not reassuring.
“I am writing Chairman Wellinghoff and want him to explain to me how America can meet its energy needs and remain competitive in the global economy without new nuclear or coal plants.  I hope he was taken out of context because what he has reportedly said is breathtaking.”
#####

Marching into darkness, indeed.

For those of you who are not sufficiently indoctrinated, we in the Energy Party believe you have to do EVERYTHING that will make us energy-independent, with the primary strategic goal of freeing us from the whims of some of the world’s worst thugs, and the side benefits of transforming our economy and saving the planet (without being all ideologically anal retentive about it). Yes, drill. Build nuclear plants. Open frickin’ Yucca Mountain. But push like crazy for electric cars (and, eventually, hydrogen). Support public transit, to get people out of their cars (and besides, I love subways, and it’s my party). Support innovation and experimentation. Lower speed limits to 55, and enforce them. And so on and so forth. Read the Manifesto, so I don’t have to repeat myself so much.

But all we ever get out of Washington in EITHER-OR. And neither ideologically limited approach is going to get us where we need to go.

Do we REALLY need people to be making RVs?

Yesterday, Mayor Bob Coble of Columbia said President Obama either had been, or would be, invited to address the National Hydrogen Association’s annual conference here in April. The mayor said, rightly, that such would be a great opportunity for the president to demonstrate his seriousness about the "green economy" and energy independence.

I heard the mayor say that yesterday afternoon.

So imagine my surprise to see that the president's first high-profile road trip beyond the Beltway (or one of the first; I'm not really keeping score) was to Elkhart, Indiana, which is suffering double-digit unemployment because…. well, because people aren't buying so many Recreational Vehicles these days.

Now, I consider it to be a BAD thing that all those people are out of work. But as the author of the Energy Party Manifesto, I have to say it's a GOOD thing, in the grand scheme and all that, that fewer people are buying RVs… In other words, I'd like to see all those good people of Elkhart working at good jobs doing something else.

One would think, given the things that he says about green technologies and energy independence, that Obama would think that, too. So I have to puzzle over the choice of Elkhart as a place to go campaign for his stimulus plan that is all about putting people to work AND protecting the environment and making us more energy-independent. It's just an odd setting. I mean, why not choose another town that's hurting, only from people losing their jobs building tubines for windmill farms or something, or printing Bibles or doing something else virtuous.

Obama's speechwriter seems to have been aware of this, so while he empathized with folks and promised jobs, he did NOT promise them jobs making RVs. Nor did he mention, specifically, that they needed to be something OTHER than making RVs, for the good of the country and their own economic future. He finessed it.

But he wouldn't have had to finesse it if he'd just made the speech somewhere else.

It’s not a scientific fact that peas and carrots go well together

For some time, I've gotten these regular e-mails called "Peas and Carrots Reports" from a South Carolina-oriented group called "Citizens for Sound Conservation." (Get it? Citizens for S.C.? I assume that's intentional.)

I've never had time really to look into what sort of group this is, or even read these reports, but I gather that it's one of those groups whose philosophy can be summed up as "Protecting the environment is great and all, but let's not get carried away." You know — we can have all the growth we want without really seriously hurting the environment. Which I don't necessarily disagree with, although I find that folks who start from that proposition generally drift more and more toward the growth, and farther and farther from the environmental protection.

No, what has vaguely bothered me about these reports is the "Peas and Carrots" part. It apparently arises from what I take to be the group's motto, "Because growth and protection go together — just like peas and carrots." The irritating thing about this to me is that I always thought the line was dumb when Forrest Gump said it, and I'm pretty sure it was meant to sound dumb, Mr. Gump being, you know, the way he was. Sort of an endearingly goofy thing to say. It was sort of meant to suggest that since peas and carrots were often packaged together and (I guess) his mama served them to him that way, he thought there was some sort of inherent connection. But there isn't, not really. Root vegetable and legume, green and orange — not a whole lot of similarities that I can see. And personally, I never thought they tasted good together. At best, an odd combo.

Anyway, that's about as far as my analysis of these reports had gone until the one I got today, which said the following (the boldfaced emphasis is mine):

    Despite the near 24-7 coverage focusing on how cool President Obama is and how his wife has already become a fashion icon, there was a good bit of news on the environmental front.  First, it’s becoming more and more apparent that Americans are skeptical of global warming – which means any state and federal policies being based upon that theory must be re-evaluated.  Second, while the causes of climate change continue to be debated our dependence on fossil fuels remains strong.  As such, support for more offshore exploration for oil and natural gas continues to grow.  And last, the private sector continues to embrace and transition into a more green economy – but government doesn’t need to overstep its bounds.  That’s the big question for 2009.

Come again? You say polls show that the propaganda campaign to cast doubt on global warming has gained some traction, so since more Americans doubt the science on this, we should change our policies?

Say what? Does that mean that if a majority of Americans comes to believe that the Earth is flat and you'll fall off if you go too far, the U.S. Navy should stay in the Western Hemisphere. (Yeah, some of our isolationists would love that, but it would still be nuts.)

I tend to get impatient with liberals who rant about how policies should be based in sound science and nothing else. Not that I've got anything against science, but because their real point is that our policies in no way should be based in deeply held values (specifically, religion-based values). Take that far enough, and you get eugenics or something equally horrible and "scientific." So when Obama said "We will restore science to its rightful place," I winced, because I know among Democrats that's code for "We'll do stem cell research whether you think it's morally right or not." That made it my second least-favorite part of a speech that on the whole I liked a lot.

But the idea that we should reverse policies meant to protect the Earth (not that we have many such policies to any serious extent) because a poll shows the average person doubts the science (never mind what the doubt is based in) is crazy.

Our republic is based in the notion that our elected representatives study issues and become more knowledgable about them than the average poll respondent. It too seldom works that way as things stand, with the ubiquity of polling and other pressures on elected officials to do the popular thing whether it's the right thing or not. This takes it to an absurd degree.

As to the larger point: Doubt is cast on global warming by people who simply do not want to do what it would take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I have gathered that they would not want to do it whatever the science is, and therefore they have resolved not to believe the science, and to cling to anything that might cast doubt on it.

I have a very different attitude: The way I look at it, even if there were only a 10 percent chance that our emissions were causing global warming, and that that was a bad thing, I say why the hell not reduce our emissions — especially since there are so many other good reasons (such as our strategic position in the world) to burn less gasoline, and to move past coal to nuclear, and all that other good Energy Party stuff.

And yeah, the fact that it MIGHT help the planet is an additional reason to do things that ought to be common sense.

Here's the thing — I'm pretty much open to any good argument. And I'm concerned enough about economic development that I still haven't made my mind up about that new coal-fired plant proposed for the Pee Dee.

Some actual GOOD news about the U.S. auto industry

I'm not up to posting a lot of commentary on it, but I didn't want to let the day pass without noting this positive development, from an Energy Party point of view:

Fourteen U.S. technology companies are joining forces and seeking $1
billion in federal aid to build a plant to make advanced batteries for
electric cars, in a bid to catch up to Asian rivals that are far ahead
of the U.S.

The effort, the latest pitch from corporate America to inject
federal dollars into a project, is similar to an alliance that two
decades ago helped the U.S. computer-chip industry restore its
competitiveness. Participants include 3M Corp. and Johnson Controls Inc.

Many experts believe battery technology and manufacturing capacity
could become as strategically important as oil is today. Auto makers,
including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor
Co., say they plan to roll out plug-in electric cars by 2010. But the
U.S. has limited capacity to make the lithium-ion batteries those cars
will need. Asian producers such as Panasonic Corp. dominate the car-battery field.

About time we got off our duffs on this. That could be a decent thing to spend federal dollars on, rather than more of the same…

Blinded by ideology

Just to show you the difference from an UnParty approach and an ideological one, take a look at The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the Detroit bailout, and compare it to ours.

Both of us are against the bailout. So we agree, right? Not quite. It seems that the one thing that bugs the WSJ the most about the deal is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it might force Detroit to make sensible cars for a change. And that, to the libertarian extremists at the Journal, would be like taking the country to Room 101 — in other words, it would be the worst thing in the world:

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that the real goal of Democrats isn’t to save jobs per se, but to tell Detroit what cars to make and how to make them. The goal is to turn GM and the rest into Big Green Machines that will stop making SUVs and trucks and start making small cars that run on something other than carbon fuel. If consumers don’t want to drive them, well, the next step will be to impose subsidies or penalties and taxes to coerce them to do so. Giving the federal government an equity stake could also lead to protectionism, as the politicians attempt to shield Detroit’s mismanaged assets from competition by citing the interests of the UAW, the environment, or some other "social" good that has nothing to do with making cars Americans will want to drive.

Here’s what’s wrong with that — or one of the things wrong with it: As I’ve made clear, I’m against the bailout. But if there IS a bailout, provisions requiring Detroit to build cars that move us toward energy independence and maybe, just maybe, reduce greenhouse gases would be a GOOD thing about deal, not a bad one.

Moreover, if we the taxpayers are putting up the money — which, we shouldn’t, but if we are — we have EVERY RIGHT in the universe to demand that Detroit make whatever kinds cars we demand. If we want them all to be purple and green two-tone three-wheelers that run on moonbeams, that by God is the kind of cars the recipients of OUR money ought to get. If the market demands some other kind of car, then the car companies that aren’t taking our frickin’ money can make them.

Of course, I also believe — as the founder of the Energy Party — that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with making it illegal to sell those idiotic land yachts that Americans have been driving for the past decade or so. SUVs are contrary to the national interest — strategically and environmentally — and I am utterly unmoved by anyone’s argument that they should be allowed to help fund the next bin Laden to come out of Saudi Arabia’s madrassas just because — and this infantile "reason" is offensive to me in the extreme — they WANT to.

Of course, the God-given right to fund petrodictators — helping Mahmoud buy the Bomb, for instance — while at the same time destroying the planet, for no better reason than some moronic desire to loom over the rest of traffic in a vehicle that can carry 8 times as many people as it ever actually carries, is of SUPREME IMPORTANCE to the editors of the WSJ. Nothing is more sacred. One gets the impression that if someone came up with a foolproof plan to capture bin Laden, neutralize the Taliban, stabilize Pakistan, turn our economy around 180 degrees, end man-made global climate change and make everyone in America a millionaire (without the currency losing value, mind you), the WSJ would be against it if it also included a requirement that CAFE standards rise.

The Obama-McCain meeting

Obama_mccain

Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect’s meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here’s the closest thing to substance I’ve seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical
challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy
economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

Here’s a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting
down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their
first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick
royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual
campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one
planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow,
Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left
and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and
build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama
camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the
self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes
that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark
spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going
to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to
fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the
outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a
possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they
were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally
said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of
all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the
bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent
challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive
conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where
we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in
order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and
opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work
together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like
solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and
protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

How Detroit got to where it is now

Make_suvs

Earlier today I wrote an editorial for tomorrow’s paper that warns against being too eager to give Detroit the means to keep doing what it’s been doing, as some in Congress seem to want to do.

My reading prior to writing that led to my post about cheap gas, and in responding to a comment on that, I was reminded of something Tom Friedman wrote the other day:

O.K., now that I have all that off my chest, what do we do? I am as
terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if
G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to
rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The
Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit
bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government
aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go.
Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a
government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical —
should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and
return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean
tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers,
closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company
… Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto
Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant
— would be an enormous mistake.”

That, in turn, reminded me of something else Paul Ingrassia wrote recently, and that’s what this post is about. Basically, I wanted to recommend his primer, "How Detroit Drove Into a Ditch," which is a nice reminder of everything the Detroit Three (formerly the "Big Three") and the UAW did to mess up the auto industry in this country.

Energy Party’s worst nightmare: gas at $1.87

You may think it’s the Republicans who were the big losers last week, but you’d be wrong. It was the Energy Party.

I realized how awful things were last night as I passed the gas stations on the way home. Hess was at $1.879.

Folks, that’s the same as less than 30 cents a gallon back when I started driving in 1968. Which is less than we were paying then. And when I think of the 1968 Buick LeSabre I used to drive (before I bought my Vega, which was really a mistake), and the mileage it got, it sends a chill to the heart.

Even I, Energy Party stalwart that I am, thought about stopping to buy some of that cheap gas, even though I had plenty in my tank.

So now everybody’s going to start buying SUVs again (which of course will create upward pressure on the gas price, but we never learn), and Obama’s going to make sure we don’t drill in Utah or wherever, and Congress wants to bail out Detroit (or perhaps we should say, it wants to bail out the UAW), whether it gets its act together or not.

As The New York Times noted on Election Day,

Just a few weeks ago, the Big Three American automakers convinced
Congress to give them $25 billion in cheap loans to retool their plants
to make fuel-efficient cars. Then, with nary a blush, the Ford Motor
Company introduced the new star in its line: the 2009, 3-ton,
16-miles-per-gallon, F-150 pickup.

Lord help us, because we won’t help ourselves.

Just to review, here’s what we should do, and are not going to do:

  • Impose a tax increase to get the pump price of gasoline back closer to $4, so the money stays in this country, and demand is curtailed, thereby driving down world prices, thereby putting more money in our national coffers for hydrogen research, developing electric cars, paying for the War on Terror, credit bailouts, a National Health Plan, and all the other stuff we can’t actually afford now.
  • Produce more of our oil domestically, whether it’s off-shore, in Utah, in Alaska, wherever — for as long as we continue to need the stuff, which will be for quite a while.
  • Put all the resources we can muster into an Apollo/Manhattan Project to make our need for oil a thing of the past ASAP. How will we pay for it? I just told you.
  • Use "stimulus" funds to build mass transit, nuclear plants and other critical energy infrastructure, rather than throwing the money to the winds the way we did with the earlier stimulus program.
  • Do all the other stuff in the Energy Party Manifesto.

There. I said my piece. Nobody’s listening, but at least somebody said it.

Mayor Bob’s update on bus funding

Just now getting to my weekend e-mails, and I see this one from Bob Coble:

I wanted to give you an update from the City County RTA Committee that met at City Hall last Thursday. City Council members include me, EW Cromartie, and Kirkman Finlay. Belinda Gergel also joined us. County Council members include Damon Jeter, Val Hutchinson, and Joyce Dickerson. Chairman Joe McEachern also attended. The Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce and other groups also were in attendance. The first meeting had four presentations from staff on a variety of background issues. Joe Cronin of the County gave an excellent overview of how our RTA compares to peer cities. I believe that all the Committee members strongly agree on two fundamental points. First that transit is an essential public service that is critical for those who depend on bus service to get to their job and the doctor; an essential environmental tool to prevent non-attainment status and become a green community; and is vital to continuing economic development. Secondly, that the County and the City have the capacity to provide funding currently and it would be unacceptable not to do so.

Frannie Heizer, as the attorney for the RTA, presented the current legal options for funding. She made the following points: First, a sales tax referendum could not be held until November 2010 (Richland County Council could call the referendum now for 2010). Secondly, Frannie believes that the use of hospitality tax for transit would require a change of state law in the 2009 Legislative Session. The County has asked for an Attorney General’s Opinion to see if hospitality tax could be used now without a change in state law. Thirdly, neither City nor County property tax can be used without a referendum and then property tax would be limited by the cap on milage. Fourth, the mass transit fee by the County and the vehicle registration fee by the City and County are available now (both fees are different legally but to the taxpayer are paid in the same way and the same amount). 

When we establish a funding plan, other issues that were discussed included the need for other governments and partners to participate in funding the RTA; doing a comprehensive operations analysis; and changing the RTA organizational structure to have advisory members for those governments that are not providing money to the system.

The next meeting will be Friday November 14th at 9:30 am at the RTA headquarters on Lucius Road. We are inviting three members from the Lexington County Council to participate.

Thanks. I will keep you updated.

Who’ll resurrect the electric car? Chrysler says IT will

Just as everyone is ready to write off Detroit, Chrysler (of all companies) tells the WSJ that it’s going to have a fleet — "portfolio" is the term it used, actually — of electric cars and trucks year after next:

Chrysler LLC is aiming to launch a full "portfolio" of electric cars and trucks, and sports-utility vehicles starting in late 2010, a person familiar with the company’s plans said.

The lineup will include front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive cars as well as so-called "body-on-frame" trucks, this person said.

At least one of the models will be a pure electric vehicle with a rechargable battery pack that Chrysler expects to have a range of 150 to 200 miles, this person said.

Others will have a battery that can last for about 40 miles and a small gasoline engine to provide power and recharge the battery for longer trips.

Chrysler expects these "range-extended" electric vehicles to go about 400 miles on eight gallons of gasoline, this person said….

I’m guessing that there will be a great deal of interest in this "portfolio" if it materializes. After all, my video short "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?" is my second-most watched video EVER on YouTube, with 27,748 views. (Which is first? Don’t ask. What that says about America is more disturbing, and a subject for another day.)

When I saw this breaking news on my Treo this morning, I thought it particularly ironic in light of the three letters to the editor I read in that same paper this morning, trashing Detroit all the way around for failing to do such things as this. I agreed with the letter writers, by the way.

I’ll believe Chrysler can pull this off when it does so. But the news is encouraging, from an Energy Party perspective.

The run on gas stations: Will banks be next?

Thursday evening one of my daughters called me; she was over at USC studying, and wanted to know if she should run out and get some gas for her aged car (which doesn’t get the best mileage). She had been told that it would go up to $5 a gallon by midnight.

I told her not to worry about it (she had half a tank). We were all just going to have to get used to higher gas prices, because they’re only going to keep ratcheting up. Getting a few gallons at a lower price this once wasn’t going to make a noticeable difference in the long run.

On the way home that night, I saw the queues of cars out into the streets. Of course, those twits — the hoarders — are the reason some stations are out today. Looks like some of us will be carpooling for the next week or so, which is not a bad thing (from an Energy Party perspective), just irritating.

But a run on the gas stations is one thing. Will the banks be next, in this pessimistic environment? I saw this in the WSJ this morning:

The crisis gripping the nation’s financial system deepened, with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. racing to sell itself over the weekend and other major U.S. institutions scrambling to show they have the financial wherewithal to ride out the crisis.

Potential buyers of Lehman were heading toward a standoff with federal officials Friday. Firms weighing offers for the battered investment bank sought financial assistance, while Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has been unwilling to support a government-led bailout, people familiar with the situation say. The weekend’s negotiations over Lehman’s fate could define the next chapter of the government’s handling of the crisis.

Friday’s unease spread beyond Lehman. Shares of American International Group Inc., the giant insurer, fell more than 30%. Standard & Poor’s said it might lower its credit ratings on AIG because of its tumbling share price and the increasing yield on its debt instruments compared with safe government Treasurys. (See related article.)

Now I don’t care much about Lehman; I don’t know what it is any more than I understand the Bear Stearns thing. But that "spreading crisis" talk seems to me a cause for concern.

How much 55 mph could save us

Ran into Samuel this morning and he gave me a break — he didn’t ask me if I had read the book yet. But he did, of course, get onto 55 mph, and he started throwing a bunch of numbers at me, and I meant to ask him to e-mail his numbers to me, but forgot, but that’s OK because when I got to the office I found that he had already sent me the numbers, over the weekend. To wit:

If we had a 55mph which Chevron says we save 22 Billion Gallons of Gas which is 524 million barrels of oil on an annual basis, here is what you get  a drop in the price of oil of at least $ 15 to $20 dollars a barrel, the dollar’s value improves and the price fall further and then the speculators see that this is not there ballgame anymore  and it falls further and so the thugocracies start seeing their boondoggles shrink and Putin , Ahmadinajad and others find out they are no longer awash in petrodollars and remember Europe is facing a slow down now and even in China  it is slowing down so now we need to go for efficiency and energy security so we can make the jump to other fuels for transportation. Now the other big factor here is inflation and if we did this we would hit it with a big bat  and slow it down significantly which then brings all  things down. Now we  cannot let out domestic retail price slip below $ 2.50 a gallon so we  need to set a floor that if the prices dips , it is taxed to fund alternative fuels , low-carbon , non-carbon, wind , solar. There are answers , but not from Washington. Are you the one ? Will you lead ? Are you related to Thomas Paine ,Thomas Jefferson, & Abigal Adams It is time for the ONES to emerge. We need new Founding Leadership.This country needs action ! Are you the ONE ?????????

As Samuel said to me this morning, "That’s the word, ‘Thugocracy.’" And he’s right. Why does Putin think he can get away with this stuff in Georgia? Because he can. And why can he? Because of the oil and gas.

Anyway, before he got away, I got Samuel to agree with me that we should do 55 AND drill, thereby reasserting the essential Energy Party organizing principle: Do Everything. Only then can we make the thugs feel it.

Note that at the end of his missive Samuel was expressing his frustration at the lack of leadership. Amen to that. He says he’s about had it with all of ’em — Democrats as well as Republicans. Of course, I’ve been there for some time.

Krauthammer strikes blow for Energy Party

Only this morning did I remember something I meant to call to your attention Sunday: Charles Krauthammer’s column espousing the central tenet of the Energy Party, which is: When it comes to Energy, Do Everything.

An excerpt:

    But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who’s against properly inflated tires? Let’s start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. (“Inflate your tires. Victory or death!”) Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.
    Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that’s been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.

How is it that the major political parties are getting away with their usual ideological garbage on Energy in this election — the Democrats refusing to produce, the Republicans refusing to conserve. It is patently obvious to anyone possessed of common sense that — in this particular economic, political and global moment especially — our one hope is to Do It All?

Are you a locavore?

Emile DeFelice, sometime contributor to this blog, said it this way: "Put Your State On Your Plate."

Hugh Weathers, the man who beat Emile to remain state agriculture commissioner, has a more succinct way of putting it: The word, he says, is "locavore."

Read about the concept, and what South Carolina is doing to promote it, in Mr. Weathers’ op-ed piece today, if you haven’t read it already. Then take the challenge — eat local for a day.

Then, do it again.

However we pay for it, we all need a better transit system

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

On Wednesday, my truck was in the shop. This sort of situation may mean slightly different things to different people. Here’s what it meant to me:

Wednesday morning, I needed a way to get from home — out west of West Columbia — to work, if for no other reason than I needed the paycheck to pay for getting my truck fixed.

Fortunately, my eldest daughter was staying at our house with her children — her husband is remodeling their home — and she works downtown. So she drove me way south of downtown to my office, before turning around and going back to her office.

(My wife couldn’t take me because she had my daughter’s six-month-old twins, and her car isn’t set up to accommodate the Apollo-capsule-type arrangements that they call baby carseats these days.)

From that point, I was stuck. I knew I was going to have to stay late at the office that night — later than anyone in my department — because I was going to be off Friday and needed to get at least a week’s worth of work done in the four days available. Besides, no one in my department lives anywhere near me. In fact, I started writing this column on Wednesday to get ahead, and as I typed this sentence at 5:23 p.m., I had no idea how I’d get home.

As it happened, my daughter got me at 8 p.m. Fortunately, she and her children had to go back into town anyway; otherwise picking me up would have involved a long round trip for somebody, with gasoline at $4 a gallon. I wasn’t quite at a stopping place when she arrived, so she waited downstairs for me with, as near as I could tell over her cell phone, at least one of the twins screaming.

Then, on Thursday morning, my truck still wasn’t ready. So we improvised a whole new plan, in which I drove my wife’s car into town, and my daughter left work at midday to take her car out to my wife so that she could go to work in the afternoon. But at least I was covered in case the job required me to be somewhere else in the course of the day, which sometimes happens.

This is ridiculous, folks.

Yes, I know: Poor me. These are decidedly spoiled American, middle-class problems.

But never mind me. The truth is, if you are less fortunate, you have a harder time owning a vehicle, fixing it when it’s broken, filling it with gasoline, or paying to park it. Nor can you afford to do without that job that the vehicle would take you to.

There are many places in this country where folks don’t have these problems. I have a New York subway card in my wallet from my last trip there, which I can’t bring myself to throw away because of the wonderful thing it represents: freedom from driving and pumping gas and finding a place to park, simply ducking down a few steps, and moments later finding myself in whatever part of town that I need to be in.

In the Columbia metropolitan area, we have our own sort of mass transit system, in theory. But it isn’t fully adequate to anyone’s needs. It doesn’t go from enough places to enough places often enough, and it’s tough for someone who just needs it occasionally to find out quickly and easily how to use it.

What we need is a better transit system, but what we’re in danger of having now is a worse one, or none at all. That’s because Richland County — the one local government that’s done the most to step up to the challenge of funding said system — is going to stop stepping up in October. That’s when the vehicle tax the county levied for that purpose runs out.

Last week, the County Council ditched a plan to hold a referendum asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase to fund the buses and other transportation needs and wants. I don’t blame the council. As we said in an editorial before the action, the Legislature has jacked up our sales taxes too high already. And besides, some of the things in that transportation proposal were more wants than needs, and only in there to get people who don’t ride buses to back the proposal.

No one knows where we go from here. The County Council doesn’t know. The citizens group that put together the plan the council rejected doesn’t know.

And just in case we got the notion that the city of Columbia would be taking up the slack, I got a preemptive call from Mayor Bob Coble Thursday morning to tell me that the options range from few to none. (While the mayor didn’t say so, that’s largely thanks to the Legislature’s tireless efforts to make sure local governments can’t pay for any local need that they aren’t paying for already.)

About the only person offering new ideas last week was regular contributor “bud” on my blog, who suggested using the city’s and county’s shares of the “hospitality tax,” a lot of which currently goes for things a whole lot less essential than a mass transit system.

As I write this, I don’t know what the best way to pay for a better transit system might be. What I do know is that Midlands governments need to find a way, for the sake of:

  • Those who have no other way to get to work now.
  • Those of us who would like a better way to work than we have now (and sometimes need one).
  • Those “knowledge workers” who are supposed to make the planned Innovista work, and who have the option of working instead in a community where it’s easier, and cheaper, and cleaner to get around.

For more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Driving slower

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
            — the late George Carlin

When I drove to Memphis a couple of weeks ago, I did a new thing — I drove under the de jure speed limit. Normally, I do what most people do, stay under the de facto limit — staying carefully under a speed that is 10 mph over the limit.

This change on my part wasn’t due to some newfound respect for the law. We know that here in the United States, no state actually means for us to drive below the stated speed. If they did, the police would stop and ticket us for exceeding it. We all know that a trooper will sit right there and watch you go by if you’re doing 78 in a 70 zone, for instance. But go 85, and he’ll get you. (One exception to this may be the Mississippi patrolmen, who are apparently too busy speeding themselves to notice anyone else doing it.)

Nor was I doing it to help fight the War on Terror. I agree with Samuel Tenenbaum that we should lower the limit to 55 and enforce it, but in the meantime, driving that much slower than the surrounding traffic is not only unsafe, but will not have a sufficiently measurable impact on energy independence to make taking your life in your hands worth it. We’ve all got to do it for it to help.

No, I drove below the limit because my family was packed into three cars, and one of those contained my wife and daughter and the six-month-old twins, and they had to stop frequently. My wife said it made her nervous to try to stay within sight of each other, so I went on ahead, but tried not to get too far ahead.

And you know what? I kind of liked it. It was … more relaxing.

Anyway, when I was getting ready for this trip, I ran into Samuel, and he said "Drive 55!" And I said I didn’t think I could do that, because I had to drive to Pennsylvania, pack my daughter’s belongings into my truck, drive back from Pennsylvania with all the stuff, and unload it at the place where she’s going to be living back in South Carolina, all between Friday morning and Monday afternoon. But I did promise to stay below the posted limits. "But that means you’ll be driving 70!" Actually, no, I assured him — since so much of the trip is in Virginia (limit 65), and the limit in PA is 65 or 55, and the small bit of Maryland is 65 or 60 (around Hagerstown), and the first 50 miles of North Carolina is 60, my average would be far below 70.

So I did it yesterday, and the results were good.

I drive a 2000 Ford Ranger. And for those of you who wonder why the founder of the Energy Party doesn’t drive a Prius, consider three things:

I can’t afford a Prius. I don’t foresee a time anywhere in the near future when I will be able to afford a Prius.

I am the designated truck owner in the family — my large, extended family. No one closely related to me owns a large, truck-type vehicle of any kind — certainly no SUVs, I’m happy to say. Whenever one of my 20-something children has to move from one apartment to another, or building materials are needed, or an attic full of stuff has to be hauled either to Goodwill or the dump or whatever, I’m the guy; I’ve got the truck.

I’ve done everything I can to be responsible about this truck-ownership thing. I went out of my way to find a 4-cylinder, manual transmission. (What this means is that I’m not only the designated truck owner, but the designated truck driver, since no one else has confidence with the manual shift, and I prefer to drive my own truck anyway.)

This brings up an ironic digression. We looked into renting a truck for moving my daughter from PA. It was going to cost more than $700 — we tried several vendors — plus the cost of renting a car to get up there. So we decided to give away a lot of her stuff — my daughter’s fine with that — and haul back only what I could get onto my Ranger. (To get your mind around this, picture the Beverly Hillbillies, only we opted not to take a rocking chair for Granny.) But I needed new tires. So I splurged and bought (via credit card) four new tires. Changing the tires revealed bearings that needed repacking, the need for new tie rod ends, and original shocks that were overdue for replacement at 110,000 miles. Total: $1,450 dollars. Samuel and Jerry Whitley, who is a CPA, told me that at least I was investing it in my truck instead of wasting it on a rental. So I guess that’s something. And it drives really well down, without that shimmy every time I went over the slightest irregularity in the road.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, my point: I drove under the speed limit the whole way. Normally, my truck gets about 22 mpg in town. I had never had it on the highway for an extended period before. Driving below the limit, I got 27 mpg on my first tank of gas. I refilled when we finally rolled into Carlisle, PA, last night, and I had gotten an awesome 28.7 mpg on the second tank. Not as good as the 31 or so we had done in my wife’s car on the Memphis trip, but this is a truck — and as we know, Detroit has put zero effort into making the things efficient, on account of their being exempted from CAFE standards all those years.

So I think it was worth the extra hour and a half or so it took — or whatever. I didn’t want to actually do the math, because that might make me want to hurry on the trip back. It’s like a Zen thing. We left Cola at 10 a.m., stopped several times, and got to Carlisle at about 8:10 p.m.

And it was also a more relaxing drive. Once you drop the usual "Gotta get there! Gotta press the guy in front of me!" mode, your head gets into a better place. I noticed this on the Memphis trip as well.

RichCo Council agrees with us on sales tax hike

The proposal to put a local penny sales tax increase for Richland County transportation needs on the November ballot presented us with a dilemma as an editorial board. Some of the main points to consider:

  • With the vehicle tax expiring in October, some way to continue funding the Midlands bus system was needed.
  • The road work identified in the plan a citizen study group came up with DID identify real needs — although the road construction, along with bike paths, etc. — were in our minds mere sweeteners (in this plan, that is) to draw more votes for the bus funding. There is indeed a need for some road construction, and MUCH road maintenance, not only in Richland County, but across our state. That has been neglected by our Legislature, which has also refused to reform the DOT, making us reluctant to see any additional funding passed, since it would pass through such an inefficient and unaccountable agency.
  • With the tax swap of last year, the Legislature has already put far too much stress on sales taxes, and too little on other mechanisms such as property and income. Another penny would exacerbate an already serious problem. It’s not as bad here yet as Tennessee, but we’re getting there.
  • The Legislature — see how often the Legislature is the source of problems? — has given local governments no better options for funding local needs.
  • Putting the question on the ballot is not the same thing as supporting it.

So, faced with all that and more, we noted the problems with a sales tax increase in our Tuesday editorial, although we reluctantly granted that at this point, perhaps the only way forward was to go ahead and have the referendum. Then, when it failed, the council would know it had to find another way to fund the buses.

Now that it has voted down even having the referendum (which we did not think the council would do, or I  didn’t anyway), the county has reached that point even more quickly.

The best option at the moment would seem to be continuing the wheel tax, while looking for a longer-term solution to paying the county’s share of operating the inadequate transit system that we have.

We may have an Energy Party candidate in Texas

You know how I’m always getting stuff about politics in other parts of the country that, in order to get through the day and pay attention to the stuff I need to pay attention to, I just automatically delete, by the gross?

Well, I stopped and backed up and undeleted one today because something caught my eye just as it was going away. It said, in part:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Noriega Charts Course for Texas, U.S. Energy Self-Sufficiency
U.S. Senate Candidate Calls Current Energy Situation Both a Short-Term Crisis and Long-Term Opportunity for Texas
Dallas – Calling our current energy situation both a “crisis and an opportunity,” U.S. Senate candidate Rick Noriega unveiled his energy plan at a press conference at Dallas City Hall this morning. Entitled “Bold Solutions for a Better Future: Energy Self-Sufficiency Now,” the Noriega energy plan is designed to provide immediate relief for Texas families; build the road to energy self-sufficiency; and develop a sustainable energy and economic future for Texas and the U.S.
    The Noriega energy plan is centered on the belief that by becoming a world leader in renewable energy, Texas will create jobs, strengthen the state’s economic base, provide a more sustainable future for state natural resources, and strengthen our national security. At the heart of the plan is the ambitious 100% in 10 effort – the goal to use entirely renewable sources for Texas household electricity needs by 2019….

This Noriega guy is apparently a Democrat, although he doesn’t go on an on about it. You mostly have to pick up on that from the use of key code phrases, such as "Take Texas Back," yadda-yadda.

But hey, with an agenda like that, he might want to think about joining us in the Energy Party. Around here, the politicians of both parties just pander to our anger over gasoline prices, without proposing to do much that is substantive.

So I don’t know much about this Noriega guy, but at least on this point, he’s capable of thinking roughly in the right direction.

Yeah, he’s real skimpy on the details — where is this plan, by the way? — but at least, as I say, he starts in the right direction.

What did you think of Al Gore’s speech?

Gore_electricity_wart

On tomorrow’s page we’ll be running a Tom Friedman piece that holds up Al Gore’s speech as the kind that the actual current president of the United States ought to be making — and the kind that an Energy Party president would certainly make. Here’s how Friedman described it:

    … If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
    Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
    Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem…

Me, I’m really busy trying to get pages out without Mike, which is not easy, let me tell you. But maybe y’all can go read Al’s speech and tell me what you think. All I know is that what I’ve heard about it — from Friedman and others who have filtered and condensed its points — sounds good. But maybe the devil’s in the details.

What do y’all think?