The flyer is quite a piece of work. Check out how they make Mackey look like a convicted criminal:

What a mean trick! Using unflattering photos of ones opponents to demonize them!

Michelle

Helen

Hillary

The flyer is quite a piece of work. Check out how they make Mackey look like a convicted criminal:

What a mean trick! Using unflattering photos of ones opponents to demonize them!

Michelle Obama

Chris Dodd

Helen Thomas

Barney Frank

Hillary Clinton

He’s been looking for a way to do this for years. Realistically, he’s among the few who can afford to buy the land and build the windmills necessary for this kind of thing. Lord knows there’s plenty of that land available, too. Once he’s bought the property, Texas law states that he’ll have exclusive rights to the minerals on site. Once upon a time, that would have meant drilling for oil. Now, especially with the ongoing drought in Texas and the increasing demand for water in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, Pickens sees a profit in harvesting the water from those west Texas lands. Of course, west Texas residents won’t benefit from it, and Dallas will still get water from reservoirs in surrounding counties (where the population is also booming and in need of water). Meanwhile, Pickens will get rich, and no one will stop him.

He’s spent years helping build a Republican base in Texas that won’t question his motives, and the power in the Republican party in Texas has shifted away from rural areas to Houston and Dallas in recent years. Also, there are very few legislators in Texas who really “get” the water problem our state is facing – something Pickens is no doubt counting on, so that no legislative roadblocks keep him from being able to accomplish this. It’s a little fishy that he’s calling for this plan in a non-legislature year for Texas, too.

Gaining all this momentum from television ads, spots on evening news programs, and relentless internet coverage is a smart plan – no doubt people who aren’t from Texas and specifically not from areas that would be affected by Pickens’ plan find it easier to smile and agree with him. But I think serious scrutiny is warranted before agreeing with him.

Where have I heard this before? Isn’t this how Arianna Huffington lost it? She was a big R until she began her support of the anti-SUV campaign.

OR Maybe T Boone just drank some of that Ron Paul Kool Aid.

with the objective to reduce CO2 emissions by 40% in 2020 will lead to displacement of base load power plants such as brown coal plants through a more flexible system based on wind and gas, with modest additional costs for wind power.

Wind is unreliable, more expensive, and just a waste of resources. There must be a reason that someone wants us to use it in place of coal. What do you suppose that reason is?

thank you.

On July 23rd, 2008 at 6:42 pm, astonerii said:

Just to be clear, the whole point of the IEA document is to reduce CO2 emissions to fight the phantom menace of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It serves no other purpose. It does not come up with any economically sensible solutions, it just works to assure governments that they can reduce CO2, but at a cost. A cost to the lifestyles of thier citizens. A cost to thier economic growth, which again is tranfered into a lower standard of living for thier citizens.

Your first assumption is wrong. The IEA document does not make any mention of or deal with global warming at all, it makes no policy judgment only the observation that penetration into the market of new intermittent sources is increasing. It deals with the nature and costs of incorporating wind and other intermittent power sources. You make many valid points in your arguments, but it is disingenuous to say it serves no other purpose than promoting a Anti CO2 global warming policy push.

Its exploration of the costs apply to whatever reason these sources are developed. It apples just as well to the reduction of reliance on imported gas/coal (a bigger deal for Western Europe than the USA) or the replacement of imported oil in transportation, as it would to any move to non CO2 producing sources.

I disagree with you that the costs of integration are that high. There are costs for sure that have to be added to the market cost when incorporating wind. So far in regions with high wind penetration the costs have been low and the existing grid operation has absorbed it without penalties. At 10% penetration of total power capacity the costs are shown to add about 10% to the wholesale price for the portion generated by wind.

That is a pretty low cost. Which is far from your doom and gloom of lowering the standard of living for our citizens and stifling economic growth.

Your other point is worthy of debate though. Is alternative power sources development as a whole economically sensible? Particularly Pickens plan for it to replace natural gas consumption for electricity so it can be used in transportation. Or the investment in replacing oil as our main transportation fuel with vehicles that draw from the electric grid, like electric cars and certain fuel cell systems.

Astonerii, you are right, that this is mostly a petroleum crisis. We are overdependent on a single energy source that comes with some serious economic and national security complications.

I want whatever energy development policy we adopt to be gone over with a fine tooth comb. It has to make sense economically. In an above post Astonerii says:

Cost, you want America to remain a strong nation, and a strong nation is built on energy and cheap energy means a more efficient economy that will grow faster and thus stronger, so that means that every dollar you waste on an unreliable energy source that costs more than the alternatives, the weaker you make America

The cheapest and most cost effective energy in the market has been up to now oil, and specifically foreign oil. With the change in security issues and the structure of the global oil market, we all now realize that there are some other factors that come into this equation of overrelying on oil.

I have no ulterior motives when I question whether we can drill our way out of this. I am a proud conservative, as were my fathers, Exxon executives going all the way back to the 1930s. There just isn’t enough domestic oil capacity to meet our expected demand in the next decades. Let alone the world’s growing demand. We can develop to estimated max pumping capacities all proven reserves and it will reduce some but not end our primary need for Middle East oil. And only reduce imports for a limited time of up to a few decades max. We just do not have the reserves to meet coming demand.

There are unproven reserves also ( oil known or suspected to exist that can not be removed with existing tech or at affordable costs}, but most of these will not be brought online quickly or cheaply to change my assertion.

Our other vast reserve discussed, Oil shale exists. But it is not cheap. It requires a huge cost to convert what is a precursor to petroleum. As far as I can tell, oil’s market costs haven’t yet climbed high enough to make oil shale worth it. And if they do I wonder just how much more attractive electric based or natural gas transportation sources might be?

Sure, Increasing our available oil pumping capacity helps, but it will not be enough to affect the global market price over time. We just can not out pump Opec to affect the global supply enough. And make no mistake about it, no matter how much of our domestic oil we pump, the price we will now always have to pay is based on expected global demand. Drill all we want, but without changing our oil usage means what China and Opec does determines the price we pay for our own oil.

So even if we could commit to increasing supply and break the current oil futures price bubble we might get cheaper oil for a time. More expensive then it has been and not expensive enough to develop oil shale and unproven reserves.

With these factors included it begins to look more and more desirable and economically feasible to make the investments to move off oil. The solution is probably to move to variety of transportation energy sources. Some natural gas, some electric, some that are electric grid sourced like fuel production for fuel cells, probably a minor amount of biofuels as we do not have the benefit of a economically viable agriculture source like Brazil has, and some traditional oil used more efficiently.

The national electric grid will be the key to meeting our needs. We have vast amounts of cheap coal. And as energy prices rise the newest generation of improved Nuclear plants looks like it could become attractive again. Whatever alternative power is feasible to incorporate coal/nuclear/hydro will have to supply 70 to 80 percent of our electricity for the coming decades.

We also have large reserves of natural gas. But I am very cautious of over-reliance on this. Natural Gas prices are now set in a global market just like oil. And there is nothing to stop our domestic production and use being added to the global demand. Pickens greatest financial coup could end up being tying natural gas to transportation and then selling off our domestic gas production to China..