Musing Minds

Energy

Maybe we can get people to use less energy if we raise the price of energy so high that we can force people to use less. Or we can just fine the oil companies for “excessive” profits. They won’t pass the costs onto consumers. No they won’t.

We can also mandate higher MPGs on new cars and trucks. The costs of that won’t be passed onto the consumer either, will it? With all the potential legislation mandating lower future need for petroleum products, why should the oil companies invest in facilities to produce more petroleum products?

Then there’s ethanol. We’ll mandate the use of ethanol, but we’ll use food to make it with. That one’s really smart. In addition to raising the cost of fuel (since ethanol is more costly to produce {and less efficient, and uses more fossil fuels to produce than it replaces}) we will also raise the cost of lots of food items. Popcorn, canned corn, corn on the cob, beef, chicken, pork, lamb (fed with corn), candy, soft drinks, juice drinks, canned fruits, Marshmallow Fluff, and other products that use corn syrup as an sweetening ingredient, also any product containing corn oil which can include the french fries at your favorite fast food place now that they’re not using trans fats anymore. There’s an idea, fuel vehicles with trans fats since they are no longer good for fueling people.

One thing that seems to be forgotten in all of this is that if you raise the cost of energy you raise the cost of EVERYTHING! You raise the cost of everything that is physically transported anywhere. Electricity, while providing “clean” transportation in San Francisco, uses some kind of fuel to make at the electricity plant. Be it natural gas, oil, coal or wood, it may be clean at the far end (running the lights in your house, running the electric buses and trains) but it costs where it’s made.

We can reduce our dependence on foreign oil if we work to get more of our own, off the coasts and at ANWR. Raising the costs of fuel to try to reduce use of fuel is the wrong answer. The costs of everything will rise and so will inflation. We can expand our limited refining capacity by reducing all the boutique blends to one for the winter and one for the summer. Refiners have to decide what volume Chicago is going to use versus what volume Atlanta will use and try to produce accordingly. If demand in Chicago rises and the supply of refined fuel is the Atlanta blend, Chicago’s out of luck until the refineries can retool and refine more of the Chicago blend.

We can reduce the costs of fuel by building more nuclear power plants. That allows more of the fuels that are currently being used to produce electricity to be freed up to produce something else.

Don’t use food to produce any kind of fuel (except human fuel). It raises the cost of food for all, but doesn’t really do much to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or improve fuel economy.

Congress needs to think carefully about the ramifications of legislation and not just legislate from the seat of their pants, reactive rather than proactive… Don’t raise our costs without giving us something real in return.