Redstate

To this story, or at least a footnote -- today's Reuters/NYT article about Venezuela's cheap, cheap gas and their "offer" to subsidize heating oil in the United States...here:

``Those gringos have everything -- so why does their gas cost so much?'' asked Tinoco between chuckles as he navigated a midday traffic jam. ``Don't they have oil reserves?''

So Chavez is giving away his country's wealth in an effort to persuade vulnerable Americans that he's not such a bad guy after all, and in the meantime many of our Congresspeople don't want us to explore for our own reserves, and taxi drivers in Venezuela do nothing but laugh at us hapless gringos.  I hope it's not lost on anyone that the article doesn't mention any of the people named and shamed in Pat's list.

While I agree that it is a good vote to have, I do wish that it would have incorporated more than just Natural Gas.  There is crude down in them thar waters too.  

I also wanted to say that what would do even more for manufacturers on the price front is to tear down the barriers that Nuclear power faces.  We need to open Yucca Mt.  and we need to encourage rather than discourage the opening of more nuclear power plants.

On all fronts nuclear makes sense.  It is renewable, it is clean, we don't need to import it.  It's cheap to maintain, and it could come online in less time than a drilling platform can tap the OCS.

and that's all I will say about that.  Citizen's Energy is Joe Kennedy's outfit.  While Chavez is blasting the U.S., Massachusetts was working to get cheap heating oil for a few less-fortunate folks.

That's the big issue that the whole world has with nuclear energy.

Don't know how other folks feel about this, but personally I don't like links to .doc files. I think pdf or even just html is more professional. If you feel the .doc file would be useful for people to modify you could include it as an extra link. Just a thought.

The macrovirus threat is overblown in most cases, and I trust Pat, but PDF or straight HTML would be a better, safer way to distribute this list.

People are leary of .DOC files and .HTML files these days too (when you have to download them.)  Also, if you post .DOC files, it would be a good idea to clean the meta-data out before posting.  This one appears pretty clean, the only thing I see is that the Total Editing Time was 7 minutes.  Just be careful to remove your name, company affiliation, etc. if you don't want it to be made public.

but most often times, the viruses go through address books and the attachments that people are willing to  open come from....friends.

While I agree that it is a good vote to have, I do wish that it would have incorporated more than just Natural Gas.  There is crude down in them thar waters too.  

I also wanted to say that what would do even more for manufacturers on the price front is to tear down the barriers that Nuclear power faces.  We need to open Yucca Mt.  and we need to encourage rather than discourage the opening of more nuclear power plants.

On all fronts nuclear makes sense.  It is renewable, it is clean, we don't need to import it.  It's cheap to maintain, and it could come online in less time than a drilling platform can tap the OCS.

In fact Europe gets about one third of its electricity from nuclear generation.  France is the leader, at 78 percent.

That is one of the reasons that they are okay with the Kyoto Climate Treaty is they rely so much more on Nuclear than we do.  

I can't remember what new program they were doing, but I do remember that France is going to have a new facility.

But what about the nuclear scare between Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl?  Isn't that really why we've been steering clear of implementing more nuclear energy???

India is "switching" to environmentally-friendly bicycle power for rural refrigeration...

We should be making more effort to reduce consumption at home.  In the construction industry, this has taken a private sector turn where developers are seeking to differentiate their properties by making them more energy efficient.  In addition, laws in CA and MA, are mandating cool roofs and air barriers to stop energy waste (in CA particularly for peak cooling).  Wish I could read more in the press about efficiencies on the demand side.

Chernobyl was a reactor thrown together by the Russians to get them nuclear power with as little effort as possible... from what I've read, I've seen high school science fair projects that were put together better than that reactor.

As far as Three Mile Island, it was just that; a scare.  Plume of water goes where it shouldn't, a five-mile radius gets radiation levels akin to an X-ray, and that's about it.

I think we focus too much on Chernobyl, to be honest... it's not a fair comparison, as those designs for a reactor wouldn't have been approved by the NRC back in the 60s, let alone today.

but we're too lazy to do something like that.

But Three-Mile Island is remembered by many.  Even though it may have been "X-ray levels" of radiation,  it did happen, and radiation was emitted.  I would say that the people living near the affected area weren't too happy about getting blasted without donning their lead coat first.  So did we have the "best nuclear accident" or scare?

There are a lot safer reactor designs since Three Mile Island.  As others have mentioned, companies in other countries have experience in building newer and better reactors, not just France.  Japan gets 30% of its power from nuclear.  Even in the U.S. the navy has continued to design nuclear power plants for subs and aircraft carriers.  I have thought that one way around the nimby's is to build plants on military bases.  They would certainly be more secure from terrorists.  They would be tough to argue against because there is already nuclear material in weapons as well as subs and aircraft carriers.

I think the actual facts of 3 mile island are less remebered than the media hype. It is that perception that will be extremely hard to overcome.

Just ask riverkeeper:

http://riverkeeper.org/campaign.php/indian_point

they have been trying to close down indian point for years. they now claim it is a terrorist target close to the city. while this may be an honest concern I believe it is just a front for the fact that they just want it shut down. if it isnt one thing its another. they say it is in the wrong place at the wrong time but I doubt they have an answer for the right place.

They even are trying to make it a racial issue!

LRvS: How does Indian Point impact the Latino community - if at all?

NB: To work so hard and to come from another country and then to find out it could all be gone by an accident at Indian Point is devastating. But, Latino communities in New York are not the only people that will be hurt.

As a Puerto Rican, I have olive-colored skin. If a terrorist attack were to happen at Indian Point, would the government come knocking on my door? I ask myself this. As an American, I would do anything in order to see some progress in closing Indian Point.

The best indication that the hype outweighs the facts? Riverkeeper has a new site that compares Indian Point to Chernobyl, they even conmmissioned a report with that title and had a special on HBO:

http://www.secureindianpoint.org/

Why do we need laws mandating cool roofs?  I would think prices would push people to do this anyway.  There are a lot of older homes wasting gobs of energy because of poor insulation and other energy leaks.  We bought a house four years ago that was built in '65.  It had only 2 or 3 inches of fiberglass that was never updated from the original build. This is in Michigan.  Within a couple years we added more to get it up to code. It did have newer windows.

Will do -- will fix it...

Politically, it might look good to put nuclear power plants on abandoned military bases, but technically, they need an abundant supply of water, because the nuclear energy is used to heat water to make steam, in order to drive a turbine to generate electricity. This limits the range of practical sites to the shores of major rivers.

In horse-and-buggy days, people tended to build cities along major rivers, because it was easier to receive supplies by ship than by land-transportation, so a nuclear power plant along a major river would likely be close to a city, and have a NIMBY problem.

What we need to do is convince people that nuclear power plants are SAFE (Chernobyl notwithstanding, but this isn't the Soviet Union), and they pollute LESS than coal-, oil-, or even natural-gas-fired power plants. If people are worried about "global warming", this can work to the advantage of nuclear power plants, because they don't emit carbon dioxide.

I was thinking active bases more than abandoned ones.

See my post above about riverkeeper. It is the best example of what you state: plants close to cities have a NIMBY problem, as well as the (unfounded) comparison to Chernobyl.

There are a lot of stationary bikes in gyms and rec centers.  Some day someone is going to hook up generators to them and charge people to produce electricity that they will sell to the power companies, lol.

Looks like you missed your chance to lift the moratorium!

Great thinking!

Of course there are navy bases that aren't near water--closed bases like Orlando), but most Navy bases are ON Water. Portsmouth NH, Boston Navy Yard(Closed), Brooklyn Navy yard(Closed), Norfolk VA, Charleston SC (Closed), Kings Bay GA, Jacksonville, FL, And similar sites on the "Left Bank".

Most all of these bases have nuclear ships and submarines in and out all year long. And thanks to Adm. Hyman Rickover, there hasn't been anything even close to a nuclear accident on any of our nuke ships or subs.

Comparing to Russia, don't ask them how many nuke boats they've lost, and how many reactor scrams/meltdowns they have had. Even if they wanted to, they'd be too embarassed to. The link to Chernobyl is strong there.

Then again, I'm against almost all proprietary formats, and .doc has been one of the big offenders in that department for a long time.  Granted nowadays OpenOffice can at least read almost all .docs, but it's still a beast to load just to look at one file.

To read about the Westinghouse Gen. III+ and Gen. IV reactors.

Also, read this.

Nuclear power is safer now than at ANY TIME in its history.  The designs are better, the fuel cycle is better-controlled, and the only thing that needs to be done is to, a little crudely, smack down the tree-huggers who don't want to see Yucca Mountain opened to take the waste sitting in pools all around the country and store it someplace safe.

And possibly, make some cool T-Shirts featuring Jane Fonda and The China Syndrome.  At least she can still remember that.  Maybe Westinghouse should bring her on a tour of the latest reactor design, so that she doesn't have to ride the Veggie Bus forever.

She'll be in good company.  All of the people at the top of the environmentalist food chain have recently recognized that nuclear is the future.  It's time for Jane to get with the program, I think.

In horse-and-buggy days, people tended to build cities along major rivers, because it was easier to receive supplies by ship than by land-transportation, so a nuclear power plant along a major river would likely be close to a city, and have a NIMBY problem.

Drive down the Mississippi (or any other major river -- every state has a few) some time. It's not a non-stop bustling metropolis from Lake Itasca to the delta. It's not even close.

We can always get illegal immigrants to run them.

Now in .pdf

"Exercise Americans Won't Do"

its always cheaper at the front end to install less efficient products - "hot" roofs, 3inch fiberglass insulation, cheap windows, etc. - but sometimes without mandate/incentive people won't think of the life cycle costs.  As you are now experiencing, the extra insulation you installed for a couple of bucks is saving you more bucks in reduced energy use.

cool roofs make more sense in the south (CA, AZ, TX, FL) than the north (WA, MI, ME), so are unlikely to be mandated there.

And a mandate can work for the greater good - reduction of peak energy use, less power plants to build, more supply for transportation, perhaps, then reduced fuel prices.

You don't think people think of this stuff when they pay their energy bills every month? The problem is the payback needs to be there for individuals to do it themselves. It often is not... which is where government comes in.

Government can mandate anything, even where there is no payback at all, and you have no choice in the matter. That's why it's such a great tool for wannabe central planners to dictate the behavior of others.

We took energy into consideration when purchasing our house.  The energy savings from the newer windows were part of the purchasing attraction. We had the house inspected, and so we knew before the buy that we would be adding insulation.

Unfortunately there is no objective way to compare energy usage when house hunting.  It would be nice to have a comparison number like they have on applicances these days.  I would prefer mandated information over mandated features.

This is my vote for the best Veggie Bus biography:

Emily Nella (aka Special Forces)

Emily woke up to the urgency of political activism on September 11th, 2001, when she was living in New York City. Since then, she has worked as an organizer on two different college campuses: Sarah Lawrence College where she earned her B.A., and City University of New York at Hunter College through NYPIRG (New York Public Interest Group). She has been engaged in forest defense activism in the Pacific Northwest, the anti-sweatshop movement, the fight for Higher Education access for all, oil dependency activism, and peace and anti-war activism. For ten years of her life, she was immersed in the world of theater and performance. She especially enjoys participating in creative and joyfully subversive acts of dissent and/or raising consciousness. This fall, she discovered that a focus on biofuels would perfectly incorporate her passions for sustainability, community empowerment, and anti-war and peace activism in a proactive way. She loves merging art with activism and believes it is the hope for our future.

It's difficult for me to explain my reaction to the Veggie Bus people, except to note that one of my former friends, a graduate of Johns Hopkins now living in San Francisco, believed (and still believes) that this is the wave of the future.  If you smoke enough dope, you can believe that, too.  

During the early to mid 1990's, some of the best and brightest minds at the most esteemed universities in this country were wrecked by drugs and AmeriClintonian horseS(S(.  I know of at least 5 other people who might have been something if it weren't for Bill Clinton.

What a mess these people have caused.  When are we going to have a class-action lawsuit against the Democrats?

Have an EnergyStar program for new construction, just like appliances. Of course with old houses you can't do much besides look at what is there. You can request heating bills, though. Some people do that.

Driving that bus around the country... They must get about 3mpg in that thing.

If that was her inspiration from 9/11, maybe she wanted to throw Bin Laden under the Veggie Bus! :)

To my friend's website, but a woman who is a lot smarter than he is finally found something of value in that carcass and cleaned him up quite a bit.  I respect her and her family too much to let anyone do any further damage.  But take it from me -- he no longer returns my phone calls -- he's a bona-fide Hopkins graduate and was the person who tried to get me to plant the Veggie Bus here at RedState, more than a year ago.  

He doesn't like me any more, and the feeling is mutual.

In California, the demand for EnergyStar, energy efficient suburban homes is growing, particularly since the majority of the development is in areas that utilize air conditioning, thus using electricity.

National Association of Home Builders, NAHB, similar to Pat Cleary's NAM, says

there was a 20% increase in 2005 among those in the home building community who are focusing their attention on green, environmentally- responsible building, which is expected to increase by another 30% this year.

So yes, I seriously think that consumers, particularly Californians with their wallets, seriously think about their energy bills.  The payback depending on the energy-saving strategy may take sometime, but the demand is their as energy costs escalate.  And as costs escalate, those consumers who haven't yet will start looking at ways to save on their monthly bills.

For existing buildings and rehabs, they think about it too, and not just in Berkeley.

Here it is.

Maybe one of the reasons Joe doesn't sleep so well at night is because that he realizes he's helping to prop up the biggest Communist in the Western Hemisphere.  Or something like that.

So we can leave the mandates out of it. The market does work.

I consider on a regular basis replacing my oil fired boiler with a propane system. But I will only replace it when it is cost effective to do so. Even with oil prices at what they are it is a very close call... far too close to lay out the cash to replace it now.

The amazing thing is that some people in this country still associate the Democrats with JFK.  I've said before that they're completely mistaken, and they've been led down the primrose path, but hey -- it's all about deception and the Europeans are listening, as is Lewis Lapham.

is the mandate.  My opinion is that in the case of infrastructure, including buildings, having the government mandate through the building codes certain energy saving requirements is good for our country.

Note that these are consensus mandates*: those within the affected industries get their input in and agreed to with other participants.

*because top-down mandates are generally frowned upon, or rejected out-of-hand.

I believe the largest city in the US not on an ocean or lake or navigable river is Indianapolis, and the reason it's where it is is because the state founders drew lines from the 4 corners of the state and picked where they crossed in the middle and said "Let's put our capitol here, there's a river there that might be useful"-- turns out the White River isn't.

Anyways, don't discount the fact that almost all major cities are on such a waterway.  If it wasn't important, why would they all be there?

How can y'all forget about Arizona.  We 1 major river, and its not even in the state, it crosses quickly and becomes our wall against Cali.  Almost all the rest of the rivers you could literally drive down, because they have no water.  And Phoenix would be the city that qualifies properly for your criteria.  I suppose you could navigate down the salt river, if you have a boat whose hull only gets submerged by 6"-1', and still then its tricky.

But that doesn't equate to having a no place to put nuclear power plants near water in non-metropolitan areas. It is no problem at all... not an issue.

Clearly most cities are built on water.

But there is still plenty of space to build reactors.

We need rules that can prevent city/county governments from blocking nuclear reactors.  Because they always will.  Heck we can't let states block them.  We need to say that building more nuclear reactors is a national imperative.  We'll build them at least 50 miles from a major city, and let's get going.

Pat, I think you owe Jack Kingston an apology you list him as a reason gas prices and your sector is being hit hard. The last time I checked manufacturers can switch back and forth to natural gas to power there company.

You need to read Jack Kingstons blog page before you open your hand and let your fingers type.

The last time I checked the futures market set the price of crude and unleaded futures contracts and the natural gas contracts not congress. Yes, I feel your sectors pain and wish the Gas companies would expand lines and crude could be refined quicker and shipped. I wish we could bypass some laws or open loopholes for older plants that refined crude and step up production.

Lower prices mean cheaper prices and lower budget shortfalls. I just wish you would look at his blog before making random points.

Thanks,

Kevin

Pat, I think you owe Jack Kingston an apology you list him as a reason gas prices and your sector is being hit hard.

If he voted against OCS drilling, he is not serious about increasing domestic energy supplies. I've read his pro-ethanol posts. Ethanol is a great farm subsidy. I guess his vote against OCS just goes to show that he isn't serious about energy independence, unless the phrase is being used as code for "agribusiness subsidies." This hardly makes him unusual in DC.

The last time I checked manufacturers can switch back and forth to natural gas to power there company.

Manufacturers have to pay transportation costs for all the stuff coming in and going out. This is going to be based on diesel fuel prices. There is no "switch" to to natural gas. Even if there was, natural gas prices are extremely high. They are as bad as oil prices. As are all other energy prices. Energy is one big happy market and changes to one part of it certainly have effects everywhere else.

The last time I checked the futures market set the price of crude and unleaded futures contracts and the natural gas contracts not congress.

When they Congress limits the supply because they don't want to drill anywhere domestically, that is not exactly the free market at work.

I just wish you would look at his blog before making random points.

I suppose Pat could say the same about you reading her story before "making random points."

You said the word IF in your blog so you do not know if he did or did not vote on your statement.

Natural gas right now is at the lowest level in 3 years at $6.36 a therm on the market. Check your facts first.

Congress still does not control where or how a company can expand its drilling. They can still ask for the papers and wait there time due to the NIMBY people.

I am sure Pat thanks you for speaking up for him or her.

Your random points show just how clueless you are regarding how prices are factored in at the pump. The market price was dropping over the past week then someone rattled the cage shot some guy and kidnapped some oil workers. The president of Iran forgot to take his pills and spoke out and the price jumped $2.00 a barrel.

Natural gas prices have dropped due to ample supply in the underground storage tanks. The last time I checked which are near records high for storage. So once again thanks for showing us how people do knee jerk reactions.

If you want to talk about long term solutions then go ahead but do not list congressmen and women and not check if one has voted or not voted on a bill.

Thanks for your reply next time like you said check your facts and tell Pat you spoke up for him or her.

Thanks,

Kevin

All I did was post the "nays" on the vote. Unfortunately, Jack Kingston -- an otherwise-strong ally of our on just about everything else -- was on there.

Pat, I was fine with your comment just took me by surprise after the last week or so with all Jack has done.

The post from this morning was to the blogger who thought I was attacking you I guess. Sorry for the confusion.

Kevin

Got it -- thanks