-By Dan Scott
President Obama’s recent speech on the progress of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to have come up short for many people. While insisting he was in charge of the whole oil spill clean up and oil well plugging operation, he still didn’t take responsibility for the incoherence of the clean up process. It goes without saying that if you can’t take responsibility for the failure, you can’t take credit for the success much less engage in corrective action.
Near the end, President Obama turned to his campaign promise, the enactment of Cap & Trade as a means to reduce or eliminate the need to drill in deep water. Furthermore, he pushed wind generation and solar panels as the implied solution. There is only one wee little problem with Obama’s solution; oil for the most part isn’t used to produce electricity. Wind and solar are not alternatives to oil but to natural gas, coal and nuclear power in order to produce electricity. Now as President of the United States surely Obama has access to the EIA (Energy Information Agency) which publishes on the internet for everyone to see how the US uses oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, etc.
Please take a moment to review the facts as presented by the EIA.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pecss_diagram.html
The facts according to the EIA: Oil by percentage of use – Transportation 71%, Industrial 23%, Residential and Commercial (heating) 5% and Electricity 1%. In fact, petroleum use as an energy source constitutes 37.1% of ALL energy use in the US.
Now the question arises, is President Obama ignorant of the facts readily available to everyone with an internet connection or is he so desperate to fulfill a campaign promise of the Green Agenda that he engaged in a high risk strategy of knowingly misleading the American People to advance a solution that has virtually (1%) nothing to do with the problem he is addressing? Both ignorance and desperation are signs of incompetence in a leader. Is Barack Obama so incompetent that he believes he can use electricity as a drop in substitute for oil OR dupe the public with a non-solution for an alternative energy source that is primarily used for electrical generation?
What Barack Obama is either ignorantly or indirectly advocating is the electric car to be powered by electricity generated by the wind or solar. Let’s examine the idea of electricity as the drop in substitute for oil in transportation. To date while some success has been made in electric cars, no one is close to cost effectively producing an electric car that matches the performance of the gasoline and diesel engine vehicle. Tesla Motors does have a roadster (sports car) at $100,000 a copy that will go 300 miles and 60 mph which comes close. The Achilles Heel of the electric car is energy storage, this problem even with Lithium batteries hasn’t been cost effectively solved. The average American doesn’t have that kind of money to invest in a vehicle much less for frivolous use as a roadster, we need something that is much more provincial. Getting to work, going shopping, or just taking kids to the game is barely within the capability of a full electric car as demonstrated by the plug-in hybrid at 20 to 40 mile range between battery charges. Forget using an electric car for long distance trips such as vacations. If you are serious about the electric car then you realize a hybrid such as the Prius is a dead end because it uses a gasoline engine to produce electricity. Yes, it gets better miles to the gallon but the point is it uses oil from the Gulf of Mexico that liberals in general demand you should do without. Now if President Obama was advocating for the electric car, he sure did a very poor job laying out the case and quite frankly missed a golden opportunity to make this an achievable goal.
Just as no one is close to mass-producing a cost effective electric car for public consumption, neither is anyone coming close to producing a wind generator or solar panel on a cost effective scale either. The Europeans have tried and are now backing off on that idea. Why should we replicate failure? Beyond the straightforward cost effective issue there is the reliability issue. Wind is only good 40% of the time at unpredictable times and solar is only good for four hours a day between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. all of which requires coal and natural gas to back them up as the Europeans have ruefully found out.
The only current alternatives to gasoline are diesel, propane and natural gas. Diesel engine technology is just only now coming to the point of passing EPA regulations on particulate matter and Nitrous Oxides emissions and thus could be a reasonable alternative to the gasoline engine but it is still made from oil extracted from the Gulf of Mexico. An engine with the proper modifications can run on propane and natural gas, but have you seen the bulky storage tanks for this fuel source? There is still a ways to go in dealing with minimizing the size and weight storage issue of propane and natural gas to get a range of 300 miles. By the way, both natural gas and propane (byproduct of the oil cracking process) still must be drilled for to extract it from the earth, namely…you guessed it, from the Gulf of Mexico. Now none of this would be an issue if liberal Democrats had not have banned the development of oil and natural gas fields on land in much of the US.
Any direction you look at the oil issue, President Obama’s advocacy of Cap & Trade is a non sequitur. Obama at this point needs to start acting like a leader by hunkering down, focusing on the problem at hand, and stop chasing windmills like Don Quixote. Failing such a change in behavior that we hope he would recognize that is necessary, he needs to resign now and let Joseph Biden take the reigns as President. It is now obvious even to many liberals that Obama is hopelessly over his head and should let someone with experience to lead.
References:
Text of President Obama’s June 15, 2010 speech
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Dan Scott calls himself a “Member of the Global Capitalist Cabal preaching Capitalism and personal responsibility as the economic solution to world poverty.” He is also a member of the 14th Amendment Society — victimhood is a liberal code word for denying the civil rights of others. He is also a proud member of the Global Warming Denier Cabal, insisting that facts not agendas determine the truth.
Dan can be reached for comments at dscott8186@yahoo.com.
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