by Nowhere Man (v2.2) (5-27-2008):
Short term solutions :
1. Repeal all or most of the Federal and State gas taxes on fuel.
2. No designer fuels, screw the EPA, only one type of fuel although the oil companies can still use additives like detergents and so on if they wish.
3. End ethanol subsidies the way it is now. Ethanol “eats” into our food supply. Corn is for eating. I know there are ways to get it from waste products, that will continue.
4. Biodiesel, good idea but let private people and industry work on it.
Long term:
1. Flat tax on all oil (really all corporations) of 10% of income.
2. Drill ANWAR, offshore, through the head of a Caribou, wherever. (3)
2a. Stop those dang Cubans and Red Chinese from slant drilling off of Florida, they are stealing our oil. Use military force if necessary.
3. Build more clean coal and atomic power plants. Solar and wind power are OK if you want to live off the grid but for large applications they fall short.
4. Build more refineries.
5. Develop oil shale and sands.
6. Charge Mexico 2 barrels of oil per illegal here per day. (Michael Savage is right)
7. Charge Iraq for saving them, maybe 10% of their output, don’t want to be too punitive yet we should get something.
8. Use coal to make fuels, if the Weimar Republic and the Nazis could do it, why can’t we?
Longer term borderline Star Trek solutions:
1. Let car companies make fuel celled vehicles that use current fuels more efficiently, hybrids, and so on, let the free market decide.
1a. The hydrogen economy is more of a bust and uses more energy than it saves, it will not work.
2. Work on atomic fusion, although it has “always been 30 years away.”
Appendix
1. Oil, coal and fossil fuels are the only easy and more economical way to provide energy for our civilization. Although we should research into other means like fusion, fuel cells and the like, but the payoff for these “Star Trek” technologies is years away so our current system, right now is the only viable alternative. Rush Limbaugh is correct, “oil is the fuel for freedom” (and just about anything else)
2. Taxing windfall profits of the oil companies is not the answer. I don’t see them as evil or good, they have a job to do, provide fuel for our society. If we tax them more, it will slow down exploration for more oil and they will just pass the cost onto us.
3. To the environmentalists out there, I’m not trying to be mean or nasty, but it is a fact of life that our society and world mainly runs on oil and coal. We need to tap the oil we have right now, we have little or no choice. We can use these fuels more efficiently and cleaner than we had in the past.
Those are some good solutions.
I would add:
1. Remove all government, federal, state and local taxes on oil and energy companies that make it unprofitable to drill in the U.S. in places like North Dakota where there is 500 billion barrels of oil, sweet crude (at least 70 years of oil).
2. Repeal all Environmental laws and government regulations on energy companies and annihilate the EPA.
3.Open all federal lands and other lands including the coal that Clinton locked up in Utah, Oil shale in Colorado, coasts, ANWR, to private energy companies.
4. Remove all restrictions on drilling, building of refineries, coal to oil liquefaction, nuclear power plants etc.
5. Ban the Democrat party, environmental groups, and unions as they are hazardous to the economy.