A CANDIDATE SMART ENOUGH TO SEE AND DO SOMETHING

Vanity U.S. Defense-American Victory | 11/3/08 | Sumner, Hill, Elgin

[AmericanVictory]

A CANDIDATE SMART ENOUGH TO SEE AND DO SOMETHING

Gordon Sumner, Mark Hill, Larry Elgin

The brilliant Dane, Bjørn Lomborg, in his terrific 2001 book “the Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World” (Cambridge) points out that the rise of the modern world has been entirely dependent upon the development of energy and, for the most part, of oil. Since the 1973 OPEC embargo struck the world with the affliction of monopoly striking at the heart of the success of the entire industrial world our leaders on both sides of the isle have persisted in ignoring this reality. We have seen the endless boondoggle of ethanol, which, after years of costly subsidies, has brought us no closer to energy independence despite President Bush and others saying such things as they can “feel us growing our way out of” our ever increasing energy dependence.

Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate, created the Department of Energy, which, like so many “let’s make government bigger” solutions has, in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, subsidized the problem rather than solving it. Under DOE’s sheparding, our dependence, as T. Boone Pickens persists in pointing out, has grown roughly from one-third to over two-thirds and our increasing dependence on foreign oil shows no sign of abating until we bring into production the wells which we should have been producing from the time that OPEC made its move. It has subsidized and spent on a vast Synfuels project which produced nothing and on oil shale projects which have also produced nothing. It ought to basically be zeroed out and its functions transferred to someone like our late colleague Tom Moorer for development, without any involvement in endless McNamara style endless years of procurement.

Much harm, as Lomborg points out, has been done by the mistaken ideas of saving the environment. For example, more oil spills come from tankers bringing in the oil that we now get from overseas than from any spills from our own drilling rigs be a factor of 5 to 1. Despite the fact that President Carter served on a nuclear submarine he showed no initiative to put us on a path to develop nuclear energy as the French have done, not to use the Navy’s experience to develop decentralized smaller use of nuclear power, which would eliminate many of the problems with huge highly centralized facilities. The Japanese seem to have gotten ahead of on this score and have even offered, we have been told, to demonstrate small clean nuclear power in some Alaskan villages at their expense, an offer to which our government seems to have failed to respond. This country was build originally on water transport. George Washington and our founders promoted and invested in canals because they saw how important that they were going to be. Presently, the general public does not understand the great importance to our economy of water transport. Our inland canal and river system embraces four fifths of our land in the lower 48 and without it we would have to shut down. Yet its improvement and development was brought to a standstill by irrational environmentalism of the sort that Lomborg points to the folly of. It came to a halt with the stopping of the cross Florida barge canal. It turned out that it was the sugar farms that were destroying the Everglades and such a canal could be built on an environmentally sound basis. It would make the present ads from railroads about fuels savings look puny by comparison. But not even the terrible floods of the past year over much of the upper Midwest made people look at more upriver dams and improved waterways as the solution to prevent it from ever happening again although the flood control that would result could also provide a huge amount of energy.

Windmills make a lot of sense in the high plains, where T. Boone Pickens lives, and he has been buying in. They make sense in the middle of the desert and in certain areas on the water but in most places windmill farms don’t make much sense and the idea of putting a windmill in your car is one of those diversions from solving the problem that we could do without.

For a number of years we have been pointing out that the pathological aversion to oil itself and the clean use of it as well as enormously increased production of it not only in this country but all over the Western Hemisphere is what we need to look at and what the government has made a mess of. The most glaring example is that the government has spent millions on oil shale with little to show for it while completely botching the development of surface deposit production, and along with it, complete mining of the oil down hole, of which we presently get a little better than one-third by conventional means. At Colonel Drake’s original oil well in Pennsylvania 90% of the oil is still down hole. As one old oil field supervisor put it to us years ago: “Most of it’s still down there; it’s packed too tightly around the sand. All we get is what flows freely off the sand.”

In recent years we have pointed to the logical starting point in a dramatic and swift move to energy independence would be the rapid deployment of the use of Bill Talbert’s patented E II gasoline. We now know that it can be burned cleanly in most of today’s cars as they are. At the most the motorist would need to improve the computerized “knock sensing” device that has been a feature of cars for years now. And mileage could be improved up to an outer limit of 40%. It would be far cheaper to make than regular gasoline because it is simpler and lower octane and we know that it does not pollute at all with regard to the three major pollutants, total hydrocarbons, nitrous oxide and carbon monoxide. With additional testing it could be burned so as to produce the same mixture out your tailpipe of oxygen and carbon dioxide as exists in the ambient air. Because it burns far more completely it would greatly reduce engine wear. With additional testing it would enable us to do away with the costly catalytic converter as unnecessary.

It is not difficult to understand the principle of this brilliant invention. Bill Talbert, after years in the business realized two things. First, for years we believed that if you had oil in the gasoline it would wet the cylinder walls and make the pistons slide more easily and thereby make the engine work better. It turned out not to be true. In fact, Bill found, if you took about 4 percent of the “heavies” out of the gasoline you could get a more efficient burn. The oil you in effect take out of the gasoline has a lot of uses and so you can sell it for other uses. Secondly, for years it was also conventional wisdom that to get power and get rid of knocking you had to go up octane. When you boosted octane you had to counter the bad effects of the boosting additives and so it went, more and more cheese on the cheeseburger, with the consumer paying for each slice. It turned out that if you went down octane with lower octane feedstock than the raw gasoline you start with, and retard the spark (which a knock sensor can do automatically) then you got a more complete burn from which all the better results flowed. This is really simplifying rather than all the present “complexifying” which the oil companies do to give you what you put in your car now. Further, since you are simplifying the production to get E II, it is far less costly than the production of the gasoline we use now — by tens of cents on the gallon.

This is not so difficult to understand. A reader of Popular Science or Popular Mechanics could readily grasp it. We thought if politicians were told about it they would take the lead and implement its use to rapidly begin the end of our dependence on foreign oil and our transfer of our wealth into the wrong hands. Alas, such a belief turned out to be completely unjustified. Politicians are too bound to the powers that run Washington to take effective action. There is no interest in disrupting the endless subsidies for ethanol and other such products or for disrupting the way oil companies presently do business. We have spoken in the past to the problem of implementing better technology in the private sector when it is disruptive. It was the problem faced by Xerox technology for many years.

Of the present four candidates for President and Vice President only two have the streak of maverick independence to do as JFK said you should do and “never listen to the experts” and tell the people immediately that they can have cheaper, cleaner, higher mileage gasoline within months and that, starting with that move, the oil weapon will be taken away from the enemy. One, by his own admission, was not a good student in math and science. But one candidate, Governor Palin, clearly has the intellect to grasp what we are talking about and has shown the willingness to buck the oil companies and do what needs to be done to drive down the price of oil further, keep if from a damaging rebound and make sure that the governments of Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia and China have to change their world view to one of entrepreneurship rather than dominating us with a one crop strategy akin to the American South before the Civil War when it tried to dominate through “King Cotton” based on slavery. John McCain has, in his words, “stood up to ethanol in Iowa.” Barack Obama, by contrast, has embraced the Eurosocialist concept of enormously high fuel prices to force lower use, cap and trade ideas to destroy coal and many other policies that would go in the opposite direction from enabling us to once again lead the world because our oil is cheap and abundant for our uses. There are several government agencies, including the military and the postal service, where E II could be used without much investment to begin a rapid move to energy independence and reduced transfer of wealth into the wrong hands that would win the present war by depriving the other side of its primary weapon.

Gordon Sumner, Mark Hill and Larry Elgin,

Rear Admiral C.A. “Mark” Hill, Jr. (U.S.N. Ret.) and Larry Elgin are members of U.S. Defense-American Victory in Washington, D.C. All three were colleagues of the late Admiral Tom Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a frequent contributor to articles on conservative web sites. Admiral Hill and Admiral Moorer worked with each other for years both in the Navy, where Admiral Hill also held a number of high positions, including a carrier command during the Vietnam War, Chief of Naval Personnel and Naval legation to Brazil. Later, after retirement Admiral Hill and Admiral Moorer founded and ran the Naval Aviation Institute. Lt. General Gordon Sumner, Jr. (U.S.A.Ret.) was head of the Inter-American Defense Board when President Jimmy Carter interrupted his work and insisted on the foolish giveaway of the Panama Canal through what General Sumner has always called “bad contracts with bad people.” Refusing a fourth star that President Carter sought to tempt him with, General Sumner refused to participate in the folly and gave up his military career. He was subsequently appointed by Ronald Reagan as ambassador at large to Latin America, where he was instrumental in forging the Caribbean Basin Initiative.

Members of USD-AV. are devoted to filling the blind spots in our strategic thinking, particularly as those blind spots were addressed by two Chinese Communist Colonels, Qiao Lang and Wang Xiangsui, in their 1999 book “Unrestricted Warfare,” which was widely read in the West but, as illustrated in this column, has not, members of USD-AV believe, yet been properly responded to in our strategic thinking. The failure of over thirty-five years for Western Hemisphere countries to deal fully with the strategic implications of the oil weapon being wielded against the free countries since the 1973 OPEC embargo is among their primary concerns at this time.

[EDINVA]

Let us pray that after three decades of the energy problem that only ocmes to the public interest when prices of gas are sky high, they continue to persue solutions instead of sweeping under the rug.