Posted on 12/25/2007 1:55:47 PM PST by rellimpank
I listed the points that you did not respond. A proper response would involve a rebuttal to each point that I raised. Instead of replying to each point, you simply raised additional questions that are not related to the topic of the thread.
Bias is a relevant point to judge the quality evidence. You have never revealed your own bias. Do you work for the ethanol or bio fuels industry? I have no dog in this hunt. I do not work for any energy company or environmental group.
You have repeatedly claimed that GW1 and GW2 were subsidies to oil. Your claim is standard for leftist websites. Bloggers on these sites often criticize Bush for trading blood for oil. If these wars were subsidies, how were the subsidies paid? Who received them? Were the subsidies given to Big Oil or OPEC? Did these subsidies lower the cost of oil production? Did these subsidies artificially inflate demand as the case for the massive ethanol and bio fuels subsidies.
My bias is for lower energy costs. Ethanol, wind, and solar are more expensive than alternatives. I see a similar situation arising with energy mandates and subsidies as we have for sugar sudsidies. Sugar producers receive subsidies in the form of import tariffs. These tariffs drive up costs for sugar consumers, particularly firms using sugar to produce other food products. Many of these firms have moved operations outside of the US to purchase sugar at a much lower price.
The subsidies and mandates for alternative energy will have a similar but much more profound effect. Energy prices in the US will become much more expensive because of these mandates and subsidies. High energy prices will cause many producers to locate production in other parts of the world with lower energy prices.
If ethanol was a valid and productive fuel, why is it mandated by states, and supported with a fifty-cent a gallon subsidy? There’s no subsidy on the beer in the fridge, why on ethanol?
Several things.
Beer is not competing against gasoline and beer at 5 percent alcohol or so is not nearly strong enough to power your car.
Nothing now known can compete against highly subsidized gasoline. We have spent 75 years or so and trillions of dollars on developing it into a viable fuel and it is still far from perfect. What we need to do is eliminate the subsidies on both oil and alternatives, but there are powerful forces protecting the oil subsidies. In the mean time, we need to put the alternatives on a level playing field with still highly subsidized oil for the reasons here stated
Here are listed dozens of oil subsidies;
http://www.icta.org/doc/Real%20Price%20of%20Gasoline.pdf
It is a national priority issue to get out from under our dependence on our enemies for a critical commodity like imported oil.
We are exporting billions of dollars out of our economy to our enemies and we need to keep the money here at home for our own economy.
If we had the political guts to tell the ecofreaks where to go we might drill more of our own oil and build new refineries to replace our antique facilities. We can not manage to do that so the alternative fuels are the next means of achieving the above economic and strategic goals.
Professor, I have already answered every question you raise and many of them twice. All you are doing is repeating yourself while refusing to provide any cites backing your own personal opinions.
You distort my words and positions and falsely accuse me of leftist positions.
I really can believe you simply do not understand the basics of energy and I can do nothing more to help you. Bringing up sugar subsidies is a red herring and demonstrates your lack of knowledge of the industry.
As you are unable to bring any fresh information to the table or to provide any cites of your own I am dropping this thread as a waste of time.
Trillions of dollars invested by independent business people and their companies, vs government handouts. That doesn't make a level playing field, that artificially waves systems that have been examined in the crucible of the economic marketplace and discarded as being a waste of time. But somehow these will be all different when people who get paid to spend government money, who build industries around spending government money, are told to develop a new fuel source, and gosh, so long as they continue to fail, they'll get more and more money. That's not leveling the playing field - that's bulldozing it, covering the ground with salt, and then trying to develop a system to cope with the salt - because salt's the problem, not the people who put it there.
Here are listed dozens of oil subsidies; http://www.icta.org/doc/Real%20Price%20of%20Gasoline.pdf
Did you bother to read the report you cite? I can't imagine you did, and posted it on a conservative forum. The yearly cost of parking lots is 200 billion? Oh, yes, alternative fuel sources will oh so deeply affect that. 8 billion because roads impact bicyclists? Travel costs? Urban sprawl? How does any of that become affected by fossil fuels unless the sole goal of the report is to advocate that we all live in stacked crates of high density housing, all use communal transportation, and... Wait, a socialist utopia of sheep - that's the goal of the report.
It is a national priority issue to get out from under our dependence on our enemies for a critical commodity like imported oil.
But that's not the goal of the report you cited - the goal of the report you cited was to eliminate roads, personally owned transportation, parking structures, independent living, etc. Yes, producing things /here/ is ideal - it's a standard goal of most on here to buy American; it's my goal too. But the biggest obstacle to buying American are the same morons who produced the report you cited - industry is bad, therefore we want to prevent industry from growing. So we have to rely more and more upon imported production, of fossil fuels as well as the material goods such as the computer you're using, because making it here is just HORRIBLE, just horrible...
If we had the political guts to tell the ecofreaks where to go we might drill more of our own oil and build new refineries to replace our antique facilities. We can not manage to do that so the alternative fuels are the next means of achieving the above economic and strategic goals.
So stop supporting the ecofreaks by quoting their reports as if they mean the slightest thing, rather than simply agreeing to build what they want you to build. As every other socialist idea they've had has proved to be ultimately, an utter failure. If it's not, then ask all those people living in the communal projects we built if their lives are better for it.
His claims of subsidies are laughable. The claim that the gulf wars were subsidies to oil is leftist rhetoric. The oil industry pays tremendous amounts of taxes. In addition, there are huge barriers to development. The industry cannot explore and develop oil resources in many promising areas of known reserves. The rats want to take away tax deductions from the oil industry that are available to many other industries. The rats would like to simply take their excess profits also.
The corn based ethanol industry is born of subsidy, lives by subsidies, and will never be free of massive subsidies. No one wants corn based ethanol except these farm state politicians. Corn based ethanol will not lower our dependence on oil. Corn-based ethanol will be the biggest boon doggle that the government has ever forced on the country.
The alternative energy industry could be a powerful, vibrant industry. The subsidies and mandates will artificially inflate the industry and lead to high energy costs. Any industry that is permanently protected from competition will result in a boon doggle. Unfortunately, the alternative energy industry is a boon doggle that may never end due to its political influence. The only way to develop a vibrant industry is to subject it to the full force of competition. Dictating huge amounts of alternative fuel that must be part of the fuel supply is a permanent subsidy and shelter from competition. We are guaranteed to have higher energy prices and lower supply than the rest of the world due to this competitive protection granted to the alternative energy industry.
Sometimes a person sees what he wants to see.
You are correct that the cite I used has many liberal absurdities in it. I focused on the believable ones expecting other conservatives to do likewise. It is hard to get good info on oil subsidies as our government and often the benefiting companies would rather we not know about them.
We are however ranging well afield of the original posts and my original positions:
1) That it is foolish to send billions of dollars into the coffers of terrorists so they can fund their war against us. Then we spend billions more to fund our military to fight them. Our non-military Homeland Security costs are beyond my ability to calculate and our personal rights have been deeply compromised.
Please Folks. DO NOT claim I said we fight in Afghanistan and Iraq for oil. I do not say this. BUT; can anyone believe we would be fighting there now if they had no oil? With no oil they would never have had the money to attack us, kill our citizens and bring down our skyscrapers. Muslims are warfaring savages, and with no oil they would be happily living in goat hair tents and riding their camels over the sand dunes to rape and pillage their brethren, not Americans clear across the ocean. With no money they would not have had our Western TVs, computers and cell phones and would barley know we exist. It would be out of sight out of mind. African Hutus and Tutsis are raping and pillaging each other, not flying planes into American buildings.
2) That it is foolish to send trillions of dollars out of our American economy and into the economies of our enemies. If we had the trillions of dollars in our American Economy that we have sent to the Middle East, who knows how much better off we might be. It is beyond my ability to picture it.
3) That it is foolish to remain dependent on an oil energy monopoly so deeply that we are dependent on our enemies for our supplies. If Iran is successful in turning the Middle East into a nuclear cinder block our energy costs will skyrocket. The US might be able to outbid the other nations that need the remaining oil supplies but the cost will be way over the cost of ethanol.
Every president and most congressmen in the last 40 years have recognized this but it has been only the past half a dozen years that we have done anything significant about it.
A basic thing one needs to understand is that big oil gave us over half a century of very cheap energy and that this cheap energy contributed mightily to our unprecedented American Standard of Living. Had Standard Oil, Mobile Oil, Texaco and the other big oil companies been corrupt and inefficient America would not be as prosperous and as safe as we are today. Government policies supported them and helped make them efficient.
The alternative energy companies are now investing huge sums of private money into the future in many segments of the energy related field. Understand that when you get into the Biotechnologies it is not one single product that they are looking at. Just a few miles down the road from me in tiny Eddyville Iowa they have a 1.5 billion dollar corn processing plant that has 4 companies and a community college working together to produce 27 products from corn.
One of these products is ethanol and I notice they consider CO2 a product, not a waste contaminant, as well they should. (Another new energy source with potential that needs some R and D help is green algae, feeding on CO2 from power plants. These things take time and money to develop. Success is never guaranteed and often no private company can stand the entire cost, which is why the government has stepped in and helped again and again).
http://www.iowabiocenter.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=35&Itemid=61
Cargill
Corn Milling
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Corn Syrup
Dextrose
Crude Corn Oil
Corn Gluten Meal
Sweet Bran®
Dry Sweetners
Acidulants
Citric Acid
Anhydrous Citric Acid
Liquid Citric Acid
Sodium Citrate
Potassium Citrate
Itaconic Acid
Glucosamine
Health & Food Technologies
Natural Vitamin E
D-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate
Mixed Tocopherols
Phytosterols
FFA
FAME
Citrous Salt
Other
CO2
Ethanol
Ajinomoto Food Ingredients LLC
Monosodium Glutamate
Ajinomoto Heartland
Threonine
Feed Grade Lysine
Wacker
Cyclodextrins
One of the subsidies for the Iowa complex is in that Indian Hills Community College helps train employees. Now I see that tiny Eddyville, which must get Boco taxes from the complex or expects to, is buying the college a fermentor. I have no Idea how many other taxpayer dollars went into this and I expect it would be hard to determine, just as it is hard to pinpoint how many taxpayer dollars goes into a gallon of gasoline.
They have room for more companies to join them on the 1600 acre complex and are looking for yet more ways to wring more products out of a kernel of corn.
The point is that it is not a few little groups taking big government handouts to build a distillery or 2 out behind the barn. Real people are investing real money and if the Iowa Biocenter complex does go broke a lot of people will lose a lot of money.
It is this kind of investment by the private sector that our government needs to encourage and that will wean us off the Muslim oil nipple.
Folks we have all been dancing around the May Pole on the subject of government subsidies. You know and I know that we conservatives tend to call all subsidies irresponsible and wasteful, but this is a lazy attitude.
In fact some subsidies are wildly irresponsible but some are not.
How many of you have heard of Methane Hydrate? That’s what I figured.
China knows about it, and so does India, S. Korea and Taiwan and they are subsidizing research into it to the tune of millions of dollars. China built a research ship just to investigate it.
Folks no private company can take the risk to research Methane Hydrate and develop it into a viable fuel, too many dollars for the R and D and it may never pay back one dime. No board of directors would dare risk their stockholders’ money that way. On the other hand some very smart people think it could well mean more recoverable energy than all the coal, natural gas and oil deposits on earth combined and the strategic importance of being ahead on the development could make or destroy nations.
Another high risk development that is being subsidized is green algae fed by the CO2 from such sources as coal power plants. Our Kansas Governor vetoed two coal power plants last summer that were going to be built using green algae to eat up the CO2 discharge and to supply a second source of energy. They say that some varieties of algae contain 50 percent oil, and this is before the plant breeders have their day at selective breeding.
Select varieties of corn are also being bred up to yield more ethanol per bushel and much work is going on in the subsidized State Ag colleges under grants for the purpose.
In time much of the corn and green algae grown in this country will be under contract to big companies like Cargill and ADM using proprietary strains developed by them, just as many hogs, chickens, turkeys and eggs are grown now, but till then the research will go on in Ag colleges under federal grants.
Yes some corn will still be used for taco shells, too much maybe as Mexican farmers are worried the US will export so much cheap corn to Mexico that it will bankrupt all the Mexican farmers, who are much less efficient at growing corn than American farmers.
Of course our government subsidizes research in worthy fields; always has and always will and liberals and conservatives alike vote for it. Sure it is a prime vehicle for pure pork barrel, but not always folks, not always.
Folks here is a link for Methane Hydrate, and yes both links are biased assuming global warming. Folks you just have to read the good and discard the bad in all these sources.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0%2C1518%2C523178%2C00.html
Link for Green Algae, one of many green algae fuel related links;
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15287313/
The people that know little and talk much think of the entire alternative energy field as being ethanol. In fact there are hundreds if not thousands of alternative energies now being developed that combined will depose King Oil.
Many of these will be niche uses, wave and tidal power making drinking water from sea water for instance. All are being researched right now by our subsidized state colleges and using grants from many sources public and private. Many of these students will eventually start their own companies using the research they did in college, and whole new industries and new fortunes will result.
It is the American way.
So does the United States; the Department of Energy publishes a quarterly newsletter on the topic, called 'Fire in the Ice', available online in PDF format. The United States has poured well over a hundred million into exploring this technology, with another 90 million for the next two years. Japan and Canada have a joint testbed production facility in Canada which is supposed to provide a proof in concept of recovering methane hydrates from the permafrost, but that's not usually mentioned, as this doesn't fit within the environmentalists ideals and likely will demonstrate that it will take more energy to extract the methane than you get from the methane itself.
China didn't build a ship, they contracted with an exploration company which conducted the core samples; South Korea did, however, make a dedicated core testing ship, though the majority of it's use is for probing their offshore natural gas resources. Through publicly funded universities, NOAA, various government agencies, and cooperation from the US Navy, the claim could easily be made that we've more than twenty exploration ships in our 'national inventory.' When you count exploration ships owned by US companies or their subsidiaries, we've closer to seventy of them.
Total investment from public sources into seafloor methane hydrate research now exceeds two billion worldwide, and total amount of methane extracted is less than the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline. But there are thousands employed who depend upon it remaining in the hands of government investment, including three full time employees at the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The focus of their efforts have turned from harvesting and extracting methane hydrates to the.. This is hard to type with a straight face. Their present investigative efforts are in the possible release of methane hydrates into the global environment and the impact on the global carbon footprint. Also of concern is the impact on 'sensitive deep ocean environments.' Finally, the 'China Syndrome' of ocean floor based methane hydrate recovery - a deep sea slide causing a wide spread tsunami triggered by a cascade release of methane hydrates as a result of harvesting methane hydrates.
Yup, that's right, we're paying millions not to figure out how to get methane up from the seafloor, but how much of that methane might be 'spilled' into the environment and how it will impact the deep ocean floor where virtually nothing can ever survive.
This is why government subsidies are awful. We pay for one goal - develop the technology to get this ice based natural gas extracted and delivered for commercial use - and we get instead - build the opposition documents that will prevent this from ever being an economically viable source and create the documents that will be used by environmentalists to ban US companies from ever participating in it.
Hi Kingu,
You are certainly knowledgeable and I appreciate the updates and new info you have given me.
So much of this energy debate has centered on last years news, or even older questions that have long since been decided.
There are many kinds of subsidies and of course billions are wasted. I like the way my neighbors are doing it in Eddyville Iowa. There Indian Hills Community College is working directly with manufacturers large and small to develop new uses for corn and to train employees for working there. Of course it is a subsidy but perhaps closer linked to the real world than some.
I see that ag and chemical giant Monsanto is buying in now with their expertise and money. The big companies will dominate the ethanol production, but hundreds of small companies serving niche markets for hundreds of corn bi-products will spin off and some will make millionaires out of their owners, engineers and stock holders.
Many of these new business owners will come out of the subsidized research and training programs in the Indian Hills Community College, bolstered by their relationships, experiences and networking with the bigger companies.
We Conservative often have a knee jerk negative reaction to the word subsidy, but not all subsidies are bad or wasteful.
larry
Subsidies are wrong, period. Even if you view some of them as being good, it doesn't overcome the essential concept: The federal government is not empowered by the constitution to take money from one group and give it to another. Tax breaks, sure, I see nothing wrong with those - if the federal government has the power to tax, it should have the same power to not tax as it sees fit. But direct payments should be eliminated, period.
Look, everyone wants to see new technologies and ideas developed. But the argument to fund those should be before the local bank board, or before the board of a charity, not in a congressional office brokered over a table. The review boards of financial institutions or enterprise funds knows how to evaluate an idea, determine it's value, and assign a risk to it. A congressional flunkie doesn't.
Does this mean that some people won't have what they want? Absolutely. The constitution doesn't guarantee that you'll be bubbly with joy all your life, nor that you'll have cable television, a cell phone in your pocket, and a new car in your driveway. There is little going on in these subsidy packages that has not already been exhaustively researched in many parts of the world. Beyond, these subsidies promise nothing in return to the American people who paid for it, as indicated by your hope that some will become millionaires. Innovation has usually come from the home garage. A tinkerer who convinces someone else that they've got what it'll take to make it. That's where Apple came from, that's where Microsoft came from. Do you imagine, for a moment, that either would exist today if the government made subsidies for computer development?
Neither would exist, we'd have hundreds of competing and poorly operating systems that likely wouldn't inter-operate with each other because there wouldn't be the essential crucible of the marketplace to pare down these ideas into winning concepts.
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