Skip to main content

How to Lower Gas Prices

I thought that I had heard enough hair-brained schemes through that purveyor of nonsense, the random email, to last me a lifetime. As if it wasn't bad enough getting emails telling you to boycott a certain gas company in hopes that they will lower their prices and have the others follow, as if Facebook users saying "Don't buy gas for a day," to hurt the gas companies wasn't utterly stupid enough (there is no other term to describe it), now we have the best advice on lowering gas prices. Ever. From Donald Trump, no less.

The Donald seems to think that all we have to do is just "tell" OPEC to lower prices, and they'll do it. But this makes no sense, you say. Ah, but The Donald is here to remind us that it just takes the right messenger, something we all should have learned from The Godfather. His point is that Obama is the wrong messenger, and I assume he wants us to believe that it is he who would make a good messenger. But if the special pleadings from George W. Bush to his friends in the Saudi royal family weren't enough to persuade OPEC, and if OPEC is controlled by lots of bad folk who don't like America very much, then who is possibly naive enough to think that we can get what we want just by asking? And what about supply and demand, or the civil war in Libya disrupting supplies...or, dare I mention it, our dwindling supplies of oil worldwide! Surely those can't have anything to do with the high cost of oil? At least that seems to be Trump's world view, or even worse, he's just purveying this tripe because he thinks that his potential base will eat it up. May I be proven wrong on that last one, but if that is the case then we are truly finished as a civilization.

Peak oil is on the horizon, and we are running out of time very quickly, probably faster than most people realize. We do ourselves no good by sticking our heads in the sand.

Comments

  1. Peak oil already passed lol. When's the last time a new reserve was discovered?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The one off the coast of Brazil was pretty substantial, and that was within the last two years. But that seems to be the exception, not the rule, and reports seem to indicate that the Saudi oil fields are nearing or are already in decline.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Today I Am Ashamed of My Alma Mater

Over a week ago, my alma mater, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, released what it touted as a "bold" and "ambitious" workforce plan for the next several years. The backlash was both strong and immediate, forcing the University Administration, currently headed by President Karen Whitney, to release a " Frequently Asked Questions " for its plan. The outrage on social media, as well as a MoveOn.org petition with several thousand signatures, doubtless have already channeled the displeasure of the community, alumni, and students with the plan. The University is accepting public feedback, but this seems to be only a political window-dressing for a plan that Whitney herself was  quoted  as saying "...is 95-98% a done deal." For over a week I debated over what form a blog on the topic would take, and while I realize that what I have to say here is little different from what I and others have already stated elsewhere, I feel the need to address thi...

How I Left Creationism

There is a discussion going on right now in the science community about whether or not we should debate creationists: it is a debate within a debate, if you will. There are good arguments on both sides, but I have to think that we should debate creationists, and we should do it as often as we can stand it. Why do I think this? Last week, I saw that Michael Shermer posted a link to a story of a woman who argued this very point. As a former creationist, it was going to debates between Shermer and Kent Hovind that began to convince her of the legitimacy of evolution and of science. I too was once a creationist. Without ever having read anything about it, without it ever having been mentioned in class (I never heard a word about evolution in high school), I was ready to pounce at the merest mention of the topic as false and godless, two of the favorite creationist talking-points. I look back at this self in amazement, at how ignorant and proud of that ignorance I was, how I failed to ...

The Hovinds...Still Poking at Straw Men

Kent Hovind, the false "Dr. Dino", and his ilk are at it again. In a new article on his website, Hovind (or whoever authored the piece, perhaps his son) claims that while creationists have no problems using miracles to explain events (a habit that perpetually makes them unfit to do real science), evolutionists criticize them for it, even though, in Hovind's mind, they rely on miracles just as much to explain their "religion" of descent through natural selection. This is, at its core, demonstrably nonsense. He claims that a "miracle" is needed to make stars and planets form out of gas, a supposed violation of Boyle's Law because there was no "outside force" acting on the gas and dust. How about gravity, Dr. Dino? That would certainly explain it, no miracles needed here. This attack is a non-sequitur. The objection has everything to do with astronomy and cosmology and nothing to do with evolution, which is the development of new species o...