During last Sunday's Eagles game (a.k.a. trouncing of the Rams), I saw a McCain ad that I just knew wasn't true. In it, Senator McCain claims that Barack Obama will raise taxes for low and middle class families, and by relation, also for small (low- and middle-income) businesses.
I wish I could find that specific commercial on McCain's website (must bee too new), or YouTube (too much noise, not enough signal), but this will have to suffice. Here's Barack Obama's Campaign Deputy Economic Policy Director, Brian Deese, showing the ad I'm referencing, and countering it point by point:
I just had to check the facts.
FactCheck.org, a non-partisan organization dedicated to setting the facts straight, has this to say about the ad:
McCain's new ad puts another stitch in what we've called his pattern of deceit on Obama's tax plan. This one claims Obama and congressional Democrats plan to push forward "painful tax increases on working American families" and that they will bring about "years of deficits," "no balanced budgets" and "billions in new government spending."
The ad is plain wrong about higher taxes on working families. In fact, Obama's economic plan would produce a tax cut for the majority of American households, with middle-income earners benefiting most. As for "years of deficits," exactly the same claim could be made about McCain's program. It's unlikely either Obama or McCain would balance the budget, and both are projected to increase the debt by trillions.
I don't really have anything else to say, except that he is a really bad liar.
After my last post, I got an email from Megan's maternal grandfather, who is someone I always enjoy talking to. He always proves to be a wealth of knowledge, and this time is no different.
I was a chemical engineering student in the early 1940's. About 1943 one of my chemical engineering professors decried the use of petroleum as a fuel because of its high value as a base chemical for the manufacture of so many things. This still is true although manufacturing uses only about 2% of the total consumption. At that time, the known reserves of oil were expected to be exhausted by the 1980s. Obviously that wasn't the case. By that time there were more known reserves than there were in the forties. There still is a large amount of oil, but obtaining it is more expensive. Off shore drilling requires starting at a point where the sea floor is several thousand feet below the surface, then drilling several more thousand feet through the earth crust. Most certainly not inexpensive.
There is confusion and certainly a large amount of political correctness in the current discussions and proposals for energy. Obviously offshore drilling is not a renewable energy source. Like the current fad of making ethanol from corn, the purpose would be to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Everybody has to get in on the act, including T. Boone Pickens. I know that wind energy and solar energy are touted as the best sources of renewable energy. Unfortunately neither one is capable of producing enough energy in addition to being highly variable and weather dependent. Some time ago I looked up the solar constant and calculated the amount of acreage that would be required to produce the quantity of electric energy then being generated. I assumed 100% conversion which is not possible. The number, which I have forgotten, was a very large area. Solar energy conversion to heat or electricity is much more efficient now than it was then, about thirty years ago. But both windmill farms and solar energy collectors are wasteful of space and unsightly. Obviously nothing can be done with the ground which is covered with solar collectors.
The problem of energy generation and usage must be treated as a complete system. Nothing but false conclusions can be drawn thinking of only one facet of the problem. Consider how energy is used. The main users are transportation, heating and manufacturing. Currently the main sources of energy to be used either directly or after conversion to electricity are organic materials or nuclear reactors. Organic materials, and I'll stretch a point to include coal in that, are burned to produce heat which is either used directly or converted to electricity. A byproduct is carbon dioxide, which seems to be the main bad boy so far as global warming is concerned. Hydrogen so far as I know,is the only fuel which can be consumed to produce heat without also producing Carbon dioxide.
What then is to be done? Oil can be replaced by electricity in probably 100% of the cases when the user is stationary. Electricity can be produced by nuclear reactors, or by consumption of coal with all the gases captured and returned to the earth, i.e. clean coal combustion. Assuming that to be the case, this leaves transportation, or all movable consumers of energy. Hydrogen powered vehicles are in an experimental stage, and may be viable sometime. Trains or any other transportation which moves in a restricted manner can be powered by electricity. There will be a large capital investment but it surely can be done. That leaves aircraft. An engine might be developed that can use hydrogen, for example and be adapted for air use. I don't know the numbers to calculate whether an airplane could carry enough hydrogen to fly several thousand miles, but since no engine has been developed with the necessary amount of power, it's a moot question. Maybe we will have to forgo air travel, or reserve the very scarce oil reserves for air travel and take the consequent pollution.
I would add two notes, though.
I find windmills to be beautiful (I'm always in awe when I drive by them) and think that the knowledge that they were creating American jobs, bolstering our economy, being eco-friendly, and reducing or eliminating our dependence on foreign oil all at the same time would only make them more beautiful to me. But to be fair, I can imagine that if every hillside and every neighborhood was covered in them, they could start to get annoying.
Solar panels don't have to be laid on the ground, taking up valuable square footage. Anyone with a southward-facing rooftop and a clear view of the sky can install some solar panels on their roof and offset their own energy costs — or under the right conditions, even put more into the grid than they're taking out; resulting in the electric company cutting them a check every month instead of the other way around. That said, I understand that solar farms are using mechanical bases that tilt the panels to get the most for their exposure, and that isn't as friendly to the average consumer installation.
Even with those caveats, though, renewable energy is the right direction to go (Anyone care to disagree? Anyone? Bueller?), and we need to go there. Now! We need to break the status quo because as my good friend Dr. Horrible says, "The status is not quo."
Even with perfect case studies like Denmark imposing high taxes on fossil fuels and driving innovation
like recycling of waste heat from coal-powered energy plants for home
heating and hot water, while simultaneously boosting their economy and
creating new jobs in the process; it seems nothing can be defeated by
the American Lowest Common Denominator. Not to mention the fact that somehow their citizens manage to work and survive with little to no gasoline usage. Gasp.
In 1973 we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.
And as if that wasn't enough to make me want to move to Denmark,
their prime minister — Anders Fogh Rasmussen — is a friggin' genius:
I have observed that in all other countries, including in America,
people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up. The
cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even
higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new
tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the
revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income
— so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save
energy and develop renewable energy.
Or if he's not a genius, at least he had the cohones to implement what every sane American
Op-Ed writer has been harping on for years, and obviously, continues to harp on.
Republicans and other pro-drillers sing the chorus of "lower prices at the pump," totally ignoring the fact that it's been proven to harm the ecosystem. They'll ask you questions like why it's not ok to drill here, but it is ok to drill in the middle east. Answer: We can't make the middle east stop drilling, that's their responsibility. Our duty is to do what's right and to set the example.
They all brush off the fact that the few hundred thousand barrels of oil we could produce in a year (that's the max, from professional estimates) would be a drop in the bucket of our consumption: tens of millions of barrels per DAY. They say things like, "at least that's 200,000 less barrels we buy from the middle east, funding their terrorism" — and to a certain extent, that's true: We'll give them 296 billion dollars instead of 300 billion. I'm sure they really feel the loss.
And what about the end-game? I'll play devils advocate for a second: Let's assume that offshore drilling (a) wouldn't harm the environment, and (b) would produce a significant decrease in prices at the pump (let's define that as $2.50 / gallon or better). Then what? Do we just plan on drilling off of our own coastiline until the reserves dry up and deal with it then? How very short-sighted.
So when you vote, think about which candidate is telling you what he thinks you want to hear, and which candidate is doing something to make sure we leave our children with a planet worth looking after. (Hint: Check the box not smeared over with oil.)
