Fam62c

Demand More for Your Auto Bailout Dollar; Oil Patch Should Bounce Back Long Term

Here's my concern with natural gas: I have a gas furnace, stove, dryer and waterheater. If you listen to the media and Boone Pickens you would think that the USA is awash in natural gas, you would think that we have so much of it that we don't know what to do with it. If this is the case NG should be really cheap but my NG gas bill increases every year. They are banking on all this NG that they believe is in the ground and below the sea but nobody really knows for sure. I'm all for locating and recovering all the NG that we have, go ahead and "drill, drill, drill" but let's not kid ourselves and think that it's cheap. As we use more of it the price will skyrocket and the cost to recover these resources will be steep. Don't get me wrong though, I would rather pay more for US NG and oil than buy from the camel-sodomizers as long as we are also going all out with wind, solar, thermal, wave, cleaner coal, nuke and whatever else we can come up with that can be produced "in house" by the USA. Energy independence will mean higher energy prices for years with the promise of reasonably priced domestic enegy in the future; that's a short term sacrifice I'm willing to make.

My dream is seeing the mideast with a bunch of worthless oil that nobody wants because technology has made it obsolete. Without all that oil money the mideast is just a bunch of desert tribes on camels living in tents and killing each other. Without oil they have nothing; there is no Sadam Hussein, Osama-Bin-Laden, Azerminidjad (whatever) Saudi Royal Family, etc. American sons, daughters, mothers and fathers wouldn't have to be killed or horribly injured in wars over energy. If we don't do something I belive that sooner or later WWIII will be fought directly or indirectly over oil.

It's such a shame; with all that oil wealth in the mideast they could have built the best housing for their people, the best schools for their children and created vibrant, modern, sophisticated societies. If they had put the money to good use I wouldn't feel so bad about buying their oil but to see all that wealth and still all that suffering, poverty, violence, hatred, intolerance and misery makes me sick.

America is going through a rough patch but I believe that when we are focused as a nation and have the will to do something we are unstoppable; energy independence is possible if we want it bad enough. We should be the ones to take the lead and show the rest of the world how it's done. Imagine the benefit to our economy if we could be energy independent and have stable energy prices over the long term; we would have an advantage that nobody else in the world has. We are one of the few nations with the available resources, technology, industrial capacity and real estate to pull it off and we are stupid if we don't. If we had started a massive push to do this after the 1970's energy shocks we would already be mostly there today.

In the long run I think that cheap oil has hurt us more than it has helped us. If oil had stayed (or had been taxed) at high levels after the '70's the market would have forced the Big-3 to adapt and they could have done it before the Japs had a chance to get a massive head start........we would still be the world's dominant auto maker; our society as a whole and our competitive position in the world would be much stronger. The future can be very bright indeed for the USA if we get up off our a$$es and make the committment to truly be free from wild energy price swings. It won't be easy and it won't happen overnight but we can do it.

Demand More for Your Auto Bailout Dollar; Oil Patch Should Bounce Back Long Term

I think he's on the right track but is reaching beyond what is economically possible at this time. If we invest in the Big-3 we have to insure that they change their ways to provide some positive benefit to the US in the form of reduced use of foreign energy. At the same time you can't force a company to build vehicles that there is little or no demand for, the company will go broke. We have to find a way to make people want alternative energy vehicles and be willing to pay enough for them that they can be built by US companies at a profit. If we don't do this why would anyone build them? A previous poster was exactly correct in pointing out that the giant trucks, SUV's and V8's were something that the public wanted when gas was cheap. The fact is that no auto company can make a profit selling vehicles that ALL get 40+ mpg. Affordable technology does not exist yet to make practical vehicles for all uses that get this mileage. Not every can drive a Prius, some people actually need larger vehicles. I'm all for NG, and Hybrids and I think that the plug-in hybrid concept has a lot of merit and will eventually be a game changer. All electric is tougher because of the limited range, size and performance for these vehicles with existing technology but they may have their place as "city cars" that will work well as a second car for certain people.

As much as I hate to say it I think that we went wrong as a society by not taxing gasoline more heavily after the 1970's energy crisis to encourage conservation and fuel efficient designs with new technology. The fact is that when gas is cheap people will waste it and alternative power sources will never take hold. We have allowed our economy to have massive exposure to oil price spikes and have given OPEC a lot of power over us. As painful as it would be over the short term I would suport a gas tax program to keep gas above say $3.50/gallon combined with a massive, government backed effort (partially funded by the gas tax) to promote alternative energy sources. If we let gas prices fall again we will go back to our wasteful ways and alternative energy development will stall out for lack of investment. The result will be a future fuel price spike that we will be unprepared for and maybe next time oil goes to $250/bbl and creates the next great depression. It sounds counterintuitive but cheap gas is bad for the US economy in the long run because we can't insure that it will remain cheap, in fact, we know that it won't. If we could take a highly variable cost and make it more of a fixed and known cost it would smooth out our economy. We didn't learn anything from the 1970's so I hope we learn this time, history will repeat itself. We have seen the tremors, if we don't prepare for the inevitable earthquake we deserve what we get when it happens.