$3 gas is here!

You mean we're not fighting terrorists today in Iraq? We're fighting Saddam Hussein? I thought Saddam was in jail awaiting trial.

Troll somewhere else.

btw, do you fly rockets?

Ted Novak TRA#5512 IEAS#75

The car that I presently have(93 Chrysler Concorde) gets about 3mpg better with ethanol. Of course on the other hand both my boat and my 90 Ramcharger get worse gas mileage with ethanol. I have also noticed that both my gas mileage and performance drop any time I have gotten gas in the Milwaukee/Chicago area, no matter what vehicle I was driving. So now when I go down to that area I make sure I have enough gas to get into and out of the area without having to refill.

Despite all of this over-hyped, mis-informed B.S. about Iraq, "war for oil", Haliburton (which is not even an "oil company"), etc....is not Venezuela the one nation, more than any others, who is currently screwing everyone else with their oil pricing? (You remember Venezuela? Their Marxist president was just *fairly* elected, with like 107% of the vote, even...Jimmy Carter assures us of that!)

And back to Iraq...even at a potential peak capacity, don't they account for only like 4% of the world's production? (And far less for the U.S., as most of ours comes from our own domestic production, and of the remainder, only a minority comes from the "Middle East")

Not quite. If you can't properly build a profitable safe secure nuke plant, you should not build a profitable unsafe nuke plant.

I was referring to the increased use of modern wind mills. But now that we have a nuclear waste depository and sky high petroleum prices, I'd expect to see more interest in safe environmentally friendly nuke plants.

You sound like you want to have your cake and eat it too. The SPR and untapped US oil in the ground will tend to keep the price of foreign oil down, but not by much. What will keep the price low is increasing foreign production, and decreasing consumption by countries bidding against us for the same oil. This can be addressed in part by our foreign policy. For example, don't piss off oil producing nations or their leaders, and for God's sake keep war out of those regions. Try to keep other oil importing nations from becoming cash rich. E.g. maintain a balance of trade with China (or even unbalanced in our favor).

Not a problem. The problem is waiting (physically and politically) for foreign sources to dry up before US reserves dry up.

Alan

Katrina will definitely hurt profits of those oil companies with principle operations in Katrina's path. Other oil companies will see higher profits, due to greater sales at higher prices, without increased costs.

Yes.

Steveo fly's rockets...good deal!

Maybe I'll see ya at a launch :)

Ted Novak TRA#5512 IEAS#75

Who said anything about building unsafe nuke plants?? The lawsuits and excessive regulations are intended to make all nuclear power plants unaffordable, regardless of how safe they are.

You implied that. Those regulations and permits are reacquired for a reason, and it is not make plants unprofitable, but to make them safe and secure. Nobody wants an unprofitable plant, because the consumers and taxpayers ultimately end up paying for it.

That is your contention, regardless of how wrong it is.

Perhaps we could build 5 new refineries on the land currently owned by 5 supreme court justices.

Horsepucky.

The vast majority of these types of regulations are either political (for NIMBY reasons, or PERCEIVED environmental problems, such as saving the snail darter), bureaucratic (no civil servant will give up power or a chance to expand their 'kingdom'), or economic (one more thing to tax that people won't complain about, because they don't understand that they will pay the taxes in higher energy rates).

BTW, my wife was a Hazardous Waste engineer for many years, and we have a good friend in the atomic energy business (he was responsible for overseeing the Chernobyl cleanup for quite some time because of his experience), so we've had many conversations about these subjects.

My proof about some of this -- during the heyday of 'Superfund', college students were being pushed into becoming Hazardous Waste engineers because it was an 'up and coming field'. Then the Superfund ended, and guess what??? All of those engineers ended up out of a job, because all they had really been doing was 'investigating' all of the dirty sites.

And the laws are so convoluted that they help no one. I don't know what state your in, but here in California a law was passed (called Proposition 65) that essentially said that you must inform people if there are any hazardous chemicals around. What was the result? Only one. If you owned a company that makes little stickers/signs that say "our facility contains chemicals known to the state of California to be carcinogenic", you made out like a bandit. For the average person, you're LESS informed than before, because a day-care center that contains household cleaners is as likely to have that sign up as an asbestos treatment facility -- so since the signs are everywhere, they are COMPLETELY IGNORED.

Another great example -- a contaminated groundwater area could have been cleaned by importing a treatment facility, pumping up the water, extracting the hazardous chemicals, then dumping the treated water back in the same spot. The dumped water would have been treated so that it was cleaner than drinking water standards (but that was the limit of the technology). However, the law said that it had to be CLEANER than drinking water if the water was dumped, thus they couldn't treat it -- and here we are over a decade later and that site (to the best of my knowledge) remains untreated.

So, please don't play the game that all of these laws and regulations are there to make us 'safe'. Some level of regulation is necessary, no argument. But the level that we currently do is absolutely insane. Look at it this way -- if we could outsource energy requirements to India or China, we would have done so by now, because politicians simply don't 'get it' that electrical energy needs to be produced close to the point of use.

David Erbas-White

Everything around here is mileage robbing 10% ethanol anyway. But whatever they do to the blend to further reduce polution in the winter costs me 4-5 MPG. My car is 5 years old.

In Japan, it's against the law to drive a car with more than 40,000 miles on it.

Our wells are history having been polluted by MTBE (those lobbyists should be shot) by the local gas station. AND a chemical leak by the local car wash. It closed the nursery next to it and we now have that bland public water. Our area was cleaned up, obviusly not completely as residual particles will be in the ground for another hundred years or so, and the waste shipped to New Jersey. Specifically a little town in south Jersey. Problem solved. ;-) Send the chemical waste back to the person's who created it, it's very simple. Those who create the problem inherit the problem.

Chuck

Yeah right.... just like the ATF demanding explosives storage and permits for exempt non-explosives.

That's not "my contention", it's what many of the environut activists have stated.

What??? That's insane.

Actually, the politicians who made the laws requiring the use of MTBE should be shot.

Sounds like you live in my area of the Pennsylvania woods. We also have MTBE contamination, from a similar source. When this was disclosed, the water company sent out a mailer refuting that it wasn't dangerous - because there were no Federal standards to define a dangerous dose. "As soon as a standard is established, we will immediately work towards compliance with it."

Funny NJ story: During and just after WWII the Army had a radium processing plant in the NJ town I later lived in (70's). When they no longer needed it, it was torn down, and the property reverted to the township - who promptly put an elementary school on it.

Flash forward 25 years. For SOME reason, the site is investigated and found to be noticeably contaminated - after my younger sisters had gone there. The school was torn down, the site was cleaned up - last I saw it was a big empty square of asphalt with a chain link fence around it.