There Is No Such Thing As Too Big Too Fail

So, the government decides to bail out AIG and look what they do with the money! Although, with what Chris Dodd put into the bill, I'm sure they knew AIG would do this.

http://www.eransworld.com/my-rants/american-international-group-aig-10-wanted-fugitives/

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/11/earlyshow/main4661900.shtml?source=mostpop_story

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/21/aig.bonuses/index.html

This is just disgusting. They should have let AIG go bankrupt and deal with it from there.

Single Payer FAQ

Some Frequently Asked Questions from Physicians for a National Health Program about a Single Payer Health Insurance Program

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/singlepayer_faq.php#socialized

I was just looking around for more information on Single Payer and found some great stuff I wanted to share.

Here's a little video about the basics. http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/whatissinglepayer.php

Some information about Taiwan and their single payer system http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89651916

This one is about Japan's system http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89626309 while Japan has a multi- payer system, insurance companies can't deny people because of pre-existing conditions and they have to cover all doctor visits. Premiums are low because the government sets the price for many procedures and medications.

Change.org

http://www.change.org/

I checked out this site the other day. It's a pretty cool idea. People vote on what issues they think are the most important. There will be two rounds of voting. First to get the top ideas in each category, and then to get the top 10 ideas overall.

From Change.org :
"The "Top 10 Ideas for America" will be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day. We will then build a national campaign to advance each idea in Congress, marshaling the resources of Change.org, MySpace, and our dozens of partner organizations and millions of combined members."

There are all sorts of ideas on the site, some more important than others and some overlapping.

You do have to create a sign it, but I had fun browsing through all the ideas and voting. I hope that they can get these ideas heard.

Ethanol

Continuing my series on fuels other than the regular gasoline we pump into our cars is this look at ethanol.

So what is ethanol?
It is the same type of alcohol as in alcoholic beverages, but it also can be burned as fuel. It's molecular formula is written as C₂H₅OH or CH₃-CH₂-OH.

Was Henry Ford right when he called alcohol the "fuel of the future"? http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol.html

This how stuff works site describes the step by step process of how it's made.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/ethanol-facts.htm

Ethanol is one of the more attractive alternatives to gasoline simply because we can use it now - if you have a car that can use it and live near E85 stations.

It is not a new technology. Brazil started using ethanol, made from sugarcane, for fuel in the 1970s. "Today more than two-thirds of all cars sold run on ethanol and all Brazilian gasoline sold at the pumps contains 25 percent ethanol." from http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0505/p04s01-woam.html

Many Brazilians drive flex fuel vehicles than can run on gasoline or ethanol. When they fill up the tank, they have a choice, and most choose the home grown, less expensive ethanol. That sounds pretty nice.

Some people argue that using these food plants for fuel will mean there won't be enough food. Well, Brazil has an overproduction of sugar just like we have an overproduction of corn (much of that corn is not edible anyway). There are also some useful by products from making ethanol, such as CO2 which is sold for use in carbonated beverages or dry ice or maybe use in paintball guns. The left over plant proteins are fed to livestock, which is making use of a byproduct but not that great for the cows. Also, who says you have to make ethanol from food?

Ethanol can be made from cellulose. Range Fuels in Georgia was granted a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America in July 2007. Cellulosic ethanol is pretty cool because not only are you using all of the plant, but its way more energy efficient than just using the sugar parts of the plant.

"Cellulosic ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! If that doesn't sound ridiculously impressive, consider that gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it and corn ethanol is totally lame, containing only 1.3 times the energy required to create it." http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/798/
I'm not sure when this year, but they plan on making 100 million gallons of ethanol per year starting sometime in 2008.

So, summing up, here are some of the benefits of ethanol:

• It is a cost effective alternative to gasoline.
• It is a renewable energy source - from plants.
• It provides high octane at a low cost.
• Ethanol blends can and are being used without modifications to car engines - most gas you buy now is 10% ethanol.
• Ethanol's high oxygen content reduces carbon monoxide emissions, and its the carbon monoxide (CO) that is the really deadly stuff.
• If you care about CO2 emissions - ethanol reduces that too.

One downside is that you'll get a little less miles per gallon, but with the price difference between ethanol and gasoline, it's still worth it.

A Note About Speculation

If you define a bubble as a faster than exponential increase in price, then we have an oil price bubble right now.


http://www.physorg.com/news134646313.html

Speculation

Gas is overpriced. We've all seen the very rapid increase in prices at the pump. Many people claim that this is due to increased demand. Well then why did the prices go up much faster than the demand did? And now, demand is actually decreasing due to the high prices, but the prices are still going up. Obviously there is something else affecting prices here.

Big investors are always looking for the next big thing. There was the tech stocks in the 90s, then mortgages and making up new mortgage products to make them look lower risk than they really were, and now we have commodity speculation. Buying billions of dollars of a commodity acts like increased demand, and causes the price to go up.

"The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It’s controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price."http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878

Not only is this causing rising oil prices, but speculators are driving up the cost of food as well (and the cost to transport the food). Since they don't seem to care that rising food prices are hurting the poor throughout the world, they need some incentive to not be horribly unethical monsters. Perhaps the threat of going to jail?

Here's an idea: how about making a law that says that if you buy commodities you have to take delivery of those commodities. (Such a law was recently proposed by Rep. John Larson, D-Conn). Where are they going to store the billions of dollars worth of oil, corn, rice, stuff? Some argue that speculators would just move to other markets, but it seems many in Europe want to limit speculation as well. Plus, a lot of the speculators are hedge funds and pension funds in the US, and I imagine that many of those investors would like to continue living here (out of prison), and would choose to stop speculation when that type of speculation became a crime. They would move on to the next big thing.

In the mean time we have two new bills that don't really do much and we await the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's report that is due out on September 15th. http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/27/news/economy/congress_speculation/?postversion=2008062715
Congress might address this issue after the 4th of July. Hopefully they'll get something done and not just argue about more drilling or windfall profit tax.



http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,559550,00.html
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/24/news/economy/oil_legislation/index.htm?postversion=2008062413
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/05/26/cnoil126.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/05/26/cnsoros126.xml

and the pretty graph is from http://zfacts.com/p/35.html

Dear US Senate, Please Protect the People from Even More Spying

It is a good news, bad news day. Thank you to the Supreme Court and Shame on the House of Representatives. Warrantless wire tapping is illegal and needs to stay that way. This is a write to your representatives issue here. The Senate hasn't voted on this yet, so write to them. Anyone who participated in warrantless wire tapping should be prosecuted and no one should be granted retroactive immunity.

http://independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2244

Second Amendment Rights Upheld

In a 5-4 ruling the Supreme Court struck down Washington D.C.'s ban on handguns.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080626/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_guns

This is very interesting stuff! This is the first time that the Supreme Court has touched this issue.



When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws have guns.

What is your opinion?

Gasoline from Coal

Since the price of gasoline has gone up so quickly (and with it the price of everything that is transported using gas) I am going to have several posts about different ways to lower the price of gas and alternative fuels. I'm sure there are competing products out there that are economical at today's prices around $4 a gallon, that oil executives don't want us to know about.

So the first fuel we'll be looking at is making gasoline (and diesel and jet fuel) from coal, a resource that there is more of than oil and that is more evenly distributed around the world.

This is not a new idea. Germany made gas from coal during World War II (more than 124,000 barrels per day worth in early 1944). Germany had almost no petroleum supplies of its own, and as supplies were cut off, they made gas from something they did have: coal.

The United States government funded research on making gas from coal starting April 5, 1944 with the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act. In 1948 America starting importing more oil than it exported. On March 15, 1948 the act was amended and funding extended to 8 years amidst concerns of an energy crisis and accusations that oil companies were driving up prices. (That part sounds familiar) The cost estimates were revised several times. In the early 1950's estimates of cost per gallon ranged from 11 cents to 34.8 cents. Gas from oil was about 10.6 cents per gallon at the time.

Then we imported more oil from the Middle East and the oil companies used their clout to stop funding for the competing product in March 1953.
http://fossil.energy.gov/aboutus/history/syntheticfuels_history.html

Some benefits of making gas from coal are: reducing dependency on foreign oil by using a domestic fuel, coal is relatively inexpensive compared to oil, we can also use heat waste by placing the coal refining near things like electric plants, and creating jobs here in the United States.

Here is a presentation by the Department of Energy's Lowell Miller http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/conf/miller/miller.ppt
It is actually pretty interesting if you give it a read (I promise that there are pretty graphs). South Africa is making gas from coal right now, and there are three of these plants under construction in China, more are in planning stages throughout the world (including the United States). Mr. Miller estimates that this will be economical at prices of $45 to $60 per barrel! And as production ramped up would decrease to $35 per barrel. With today's prices of over $100 a barrel that is a significant difference!
Mr. Miller also gave a statement to the U.S. Senate in April 2006 which can be found here: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/epact/pdfs/plg_docket/statement_lowell_miller.pdf
in which Mr. Miller gives a nice summery of the history of gas from coal:

"Production of liquid fuels from coal has a long history, and the significant advances made in technology over the past two decades make it a potential component of a strategy to increase domestic production of liquid fuels. In the early 1900’s coal was first reacted with hydrogen and process solvent at high temperature and pressure, and produced a coal-derived liquid or synthetic crude oil. This direct liquefaction approach was later improved and used by Germany in the second world war to fuel the Luftwaffe with high octane aviation gasoline. In the 1920’s two German scientists, Fischer and Tropsch, passed synthesis gas – consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen – over metallic catalysts and produced pure hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons produced by the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process proved to be excellent transportation fuels. This overall coal-to-liquids process, known as indirect liquefaction because it first involves complete breakdown of the coal to synthesis gas, was used commercially in the 1950’s by the South African Synthetic Oil Corporation (SASOL) to produce transportation fuels (gasoline and diesel) using synthesis gas produced by the gasification of coal. Since then, SASOL has built two large
facilities that produce over 150,000 barrels per day of transportation fuels. The South African government enabled these plants to be built by providing a price floor safety net for SASOL’s coal liquids. In both cases, Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, the primary motivation for government support of coal liquids was that the countries were not able to access world oil markets."

Mr. Miller also says that "These indirect liquefaction of coal processes produce clean, zero sulfur liquid fuels that are cleaner than required under the EPA Tier II fuel regulations" (and he assumes that CO2 is a pollutant, but that's another post)

This is sounding pretty good. You could alway write to your representatives and tell them you like this gas from coal idea while telling them to shoot down the Lieberman-Warner bill aka America's Security Act of 2007 (What is with the 1984esk naming of this stuff anyway?). If you haven't heard it would put a cap on CO2 emissions and tax the American public for making CO2 and letting the rich buy exceptions. It would also cost the U.S. an estimated 1 to 3 million jobs by 2020.

Anyway, when can I buy this gas from coal at the pump?
Happy Reading. :)


http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/002049.html

http://environmental-engineering.suite101.com/article.cfm/coal_gasification

Hillary Clinton is an Embarassment to Women

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/24/do2411.xml


I found this article that I wanted to share.
Does she want to run based on her husband's connections and fame or complain about sexism.

I've heard more people complaining about Senator Obama being black than about Hillary being a woman. Ugh, people, get over yourselves and complain about something that matters. She's said some pretty mean stuff about him too. It's pretty hypocritical to sling mud one minute and complain that everyone is being mean to her the next. Besides they're in the same party, and this is still the primary. Does she really want to help the Republicans and McCain by bashing Obama? And when is she going to do the math and realize that she not getting the nomination and that she is how many millions in debt?