Obamessiah: Turning water into wine and nothing into energy

By Jan Poller

Maybe having a degree in math and physics and a life-long love of fast cars makes me not understand the change of vision the Obamessiah is attempting to bring to us. Perhaps, I can bring a little bit of reality to people who do not have the technical background that I (and millions of others) have. I hate to bore you with technical details, but it is necessary to put them in to show that Obama's statements are strictly political, designed to mislead people and are at odds with reality.

Obama says that electric cars will save us from oil and fossil fuel. Electric cars are not a viable alternative to the current fleet of cars. Everyone knows this, which is why Obama is making his call for massive investment in electric car research. Never mind that private industry is investing far more than Obama is saying he will invest.

There are approximately 600 million cars in the world of which 243 million are in the United States. Think about that when it comes to pollution and the use of resources. Also think about it as an industry that employees millions of people.

Today, we have a really good comparison of a state-of-the-art electric car and a conventional car. The electric car is the Tesla Roadster which is based on the Lotus Elise SC sports car and is built in the same factory. Both cars are based on the same aluminum frame with composite bodies. I am boring you with the specifications to make the point that electric cars are not feasible replacements for today's cars. Basic physics: the more anything weighs the more energy it takes to move it around.

Elise source

Tesla source

Electric car information is available. Obama and the Democrats studiously ignore exact information and just give us "feel good" platitudes.

Obama is going to mandate that we develop technology in a year or two that we haven't been able to develop in 150 years. He compares his plan to the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb in just a few years. What he doesn't realize is that the atomic bomb had a hundred years of physics behind it including knowledge of radioactivity and chain reactions. We do not have the same physics to produce a battery suitable for mass production to power a car.

When you look at energy saving articles and comments on pro-Obama web sites like www.huffingtonpost.com you find huge support that putting a little more air in your tires is going to reduce our oil consumption enough to affect the price of gas. You also find energy saving tips like "turn off your computers when you aren't using them". Well, a typical laptop computer as the equivalent of 6 batteries as used in the Tesla. The Tesla Roadster with its 6800 batteries is equivalent to plugging in 1133 laptop computers! You can make your own comparison on that.

Even if we invent the technology tomorrow, Obama has no clue how long it takes to put a new model car into production. Once a car is designed, it has to be tested, the tooling produced and the factories modified. It costs at least $one billion to make the tooling and set up the factory. It took General Motors from 2006 to 2008 to take the new Chevrolet Camaro from concept to production using existing platforms, engines, suspensions and other components.

Obama is forecasting one million electric cars a year by 2015. That is not a lot of cars. In the United States, we have a fleet of 243 million cars and we purchase about 16 million a year. One million is 4/10%. They will have no meaningful effect on fuel usage for many, many years.

Obamessiah talks about creating new jobs in Michigan. He is also talking about putting the oil companies and their hundreds of thousands of employees out of business. He wants to take all of their profits as a tax and give it to "the people". So, besides putting them out of the oil business, he wants to make sure that they don't have funds to get into a new business.

The added weight of the batteries over the gas engine version of cars requires more energy to move the car. If transportation uses 20 million barrels of fuel today, switching to electric will require the energy equivalent plus the additional amount for the additional weight. Where is this energy going to come from? Nuclear is ruled out. Wind off Cape Cod is a No No. We can't use coal, either.

All this energy is going to come from things not yet invented. Obama will need to have congress repeal or change the laws of physics to accomplish his implied goals.

Buy it if you want, but not a single implied goal of his can be met even if we have a battery life breakthrough tomorrow.

Last night, I watched an episode of "Ice Road Truckers" on the History Channel. This show is about blue collar truck drivers delivering supplies and equipment of frozen lakes, rivers and Barents Sea. Our "liberal" and "progressive" intellectuals take pride in not watching such shows on TV because they aren't intellectually stimulating, they aren't Meet the Press or Chris Mathews.

There is much to learn from this show and what we learn is the self-imposed ignorance the hard left and extreme Greenies. These truckers are Canadian. They are hauling supplies and equipment to the far north of Canada to support energy companies and diamond mines. They haul out waste. They haul out dirty snow. They leave a site as clean as when they got there.

Last night's episode showed scientists camped out on ice over open water researching the capture of methane from sea-floor methane hydrates. They showed that it works. In that part of the arctic, there are over a trillion cubic feet of methane.

We Americans are not allowed to do this research. The Canadians and the rest of the world can. We Americans are not allowed to drill for oil in the frozen north. The Canadians and the rest of the world can. We Americans are not allowed to drill far off the coasts. The Norwegians and English are free to drill in the North Sea. We, in Virginia, are not allowed to study uranium deposits - despite having the 7^th largest know deposit at 110 million pounds. Africans, Canadian and Australians are free to do so. We Americans are not allowed to build new nuclear power plants. The rest of the world is.

Do we hear any of the Environmentalists complain about what any other country is doing? Absolutely not! The same people who decry American nuclear power plants, who stop us from building more are the very same people who strongly support Iran's nuclear power program.

What is going on here?

Obama and the Democrats keep saying, "We can't drill our way out of the problem". That is true when you realize what they think the problem is. It isn't high energy prices: they want us to pay even more. Obama has said so himself.

No, "The Problem" is that Americans live too well and use to much of the worlds resources.

How do we solve "The Problem"? We solve it by restricting the use of energy and raw materials. We reduce our standard of living to that of, say, Europe. This is not about per capita GDP. This is about how we actually live. Watch "International House hunting" on HG-TV (House and Garden TV - another non-intellectual show that isn't watched by the hard left intellectuals). See what housing is like in London, Glasgow, Paris, Portugal, Italy and Buenos Aires and compare it to our housing. Compare kitchens and bathrooms. Compare our 15 CU FT refrigerators and Freezers to an under-counter refrigerator.

The hard left wants us to be a less powerful, less industrialized poorer nation. They want us to give up our cars for buses. They want us to wash our dishes by hand and dry our clothes in the wind. They want US, not them. Al Gore isn't giving up his big house, his SUV, his private airplane flights, his new boat to live the way he wants US to live.

Obama wants to take Exxon-Mobile's profits and give them away. Has he set an example by giving away his riches?

The lefties of the world want to diminish the power of the United States. Then they want to destroy the power of Western civilization. They want to destroy Capitalism. They want absolute equality for all. Except for the leaders, of course... Just like Communist China and Communist Russia.

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