November 20, 2005
CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE:
In Praise of High Gas Prices: Why sticker shock when filling our cars or our oil tanks is a good thing. (Thomas M. Keane Jr., November 20, 2005, Boston Globe)
[H]aving seen gasoline and oil at new highs, the oft-heard political prescription, from both sides of the partisan divide, is to try somehow to ease the pain. Tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the government-controlled stockpile of crude oil. Reduce pump prices by cutting highway taxes. Jaw-bone oil companies and gas station operators. Dispense with environmental controls. Subsidize home heating costs.All of those are exactly the wrong things to do. If we let markets work, the energy problem will resolve itself. But if, albeit with the best of intentions, government intervenes and tries artificially to push prices down, today's problem will indeed become tomorrow's crisis.
The reasons come down to the fundamentals of economics - demand and supply. When something gets more expensive, people use less of it. Even now, rising energy prices are altering our behavior. One reads anecdotes of commuters running cars on fryer grease or abandoning their vehicles for bicycles. More commonly, we're doing little things, such as thinking harder about the trips we take, turning down thermostats, or shutting off unused appliances.
Higher prices also affect some of our most important decisions: the kinds of cars we buy, the size of our homes, and even where we choose to live. Thus, for example, SUV sales are dropping while those of hybrids (which combine gas engines with electric motors) are up. True, hybrids get better mileage than their conventional counterparts, but they also cost about $3,500 more. Run the numbers and - with gas at $1.25 a gallon - it might take more than 12 years to pay back that price difference, making hybrids an expensive sacrifice. But with gas at, say, $3, the payback period drops to a more reasonable five years - which explains why Toyota now anticipates selling more than 1 million hybrids by 2010. And if gas prices were to drop back to the lows of the 1990s? Goodbye hybrids; hello again to SUVs.
Pity the poor liberal, who thinks free markets will drive prices up. It is because higher gas prices are desirable that we need to warp the market by adding higher taxes. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 20, 2005 4:17 PM
Pity the poor leftist, who thinks higher prices are desirable.
Posted by: joe shropshire at November 20, 2005 4:47 PMWhat should a suitcase nuke cost?
Posted by: oj at November 20, 2005 4:53 PMWhat sort of self-righteous hysteria is it that equates a tank full of gas to a suitcase nuke?
Posted by: joe shropshire at November 20, 2005 5:37 PMJoe: Lefty self-righteous hysteria, but I'm guessing that was a rhetorical question.
Posted by: David Cohen at November 20, 2005 6:58 PMI think OJ has hit on a solution to the obesity "epidemic".
Posted by: JimBobElrod at November 20, 2005 8:10 PMHardly a coincidence that once food became virtually free we got fat.
Posted by: oj at November 20, 2005 8:17 PMNo, we're agreed that life would be a lot more liveable around here if only you'd devoted yourself to some sound ideas. Cold fusion, perhaps, or maybe perpetual motion machines.
Posted by: joe shropshire at November 20, 2005 10:01 PMjoe:
We certainly ought to be fundinmg fusion research. Voyager is a perpetual motion machine.
Posted by: oj at November 20, 2005 10:54 PM
We certainly ought to be funding fusion research.
Agreed, and we are. (Boy, are we ever) !
LIVERMORE, Calif. - (23 May 05) [All emph. add.] Ed Moses talks of the "grand challenge" [...], comparing it to trying to hit the strike zone with a baseball from 350 miles away, or tossing a dime into a parking meter from 40 miles. [...]In a building the size of a football stadium, engineers have assembled the framework for a network of 192 laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser. The trip will take one-thousandth of a second during which the light's energy is amplified many billions of times to create a brief laser pulse [more powerful than] 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States. The goal is to create unimaginable heat - 180 million degrees Fahrenheit - and intense pressure from all directions on a BB-size hydrogen fuel pellet, compressing it to one-thirtieth of its size. The result, the scientists hope, will be fusion ignition, so that more energy is released than is generated by the laser beams. [...]
When completed in 2008, the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, as the laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories is called, will [...] provide a platform for many experiments in high-energy and high-density physics, from learning more about the planets and stars to advancing the elusive hunt for fusion energy to generate electric power [...]
The government is investing $3.5 billion, and possibly several billion dollars more, in NIF for another reason: national security. If NIF achieves fusion ignition, it will for the first time in a laboratory simulate the pressures and heat of a nuclear explosion, allowing nuclear weapons scientists to study the performance and readiness of the country's aging nuclear arsenal, without actually detonating a nuclear device. [...]
When the idea of a new, super laser first emerged in the early 1990s, the cost was put at less than $700 million. [...] Critics contend the price is now up to $5 billion when associated expenses such as developing a target capsule capable of achieving fusion ignition are included... more
Voyager is a perpetual motion machine.
Clever, but not quite.
Voyager is being almost imperceptibly slowed by micro impacts with almost-not-there debris and gasses.
While it'll still be moving when my corpse is feeding daisies, (or other humans, depending on how well things go), it will eventually come to a stop - unless it's destroyed or captured by a gravity well first.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 21, 2005 1:32 AM
or not
Posted by: oj at November 21, 2005 8:04 AMVoyager only gives the appearance of being a perpetual motion machine because it is doing virtually no work.
And only if you ignore the huge amount of energy expended to get it coasting in the first place.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at November 21, 2005 8:48 AMI don't think he means that Voyager. I think he actually means the Star Trek Voyager. In which case, I admit defeat -- it is inane to talk to him.
Posted by: joe shropshire at November 21, 2005 10:55 AM