On Gas Prices

[CC27]

TygrBright (19,273 posts)


On Gas Prices

Gas prices have rocketed up. Listen to the howls of anguish.

Some of them legitimately evoke sympathy: The single parent juggling three part-time jobs with a total daily commute of 70 miles and the narrowest margin in their budget between survival and disaster.

Some of them, not so much. (Looking at YOU, sad little men compensating for your unacknowledged low self esteem with your giant internal combustion machines.)

Who's "responsible" for this "disaster"?

Could be P*, another sad little man with unacknowledged self-esteem issues and far too much power to inflict misery on others to compensate.

On the other hand, it could be greedy-ass petroexecs, grifting as hard as they can at every conceivable opportunity, knowing that the party will run out of beer sooner or later.

But you know what this really reminds me of?

(Some of y'all already know that my esteemed spouse and I have a lot of experience in the world of addiction, treatment, and recovery.)

Right now, the "free/Western/industrialized/whatthe****ever" world reminds me of a person with addiction who walked all unknowing into an intervention session.

And they have NO plans to give up The Drug.

They CAN'T.

They NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED it, to manage their (long litany of terrible, important-sounding ISSUES.)

Besides, if they didn't have The Drug, they just couldn't FUNCTION! There's nothing else that will work to keep them going!

Or, at any rate, all the stuff the loving intervening family and experienced intervention professionals are offering is like TOTALLY not even possible to replace The Drug. Would take WAY too much pain and effort to make the change.

CERTAINLY can't afford to do it right NOW. Maybe down the road, yanno?

Yes, okay, The Drug is a problem, in some ways. Yes, okay, maybe the person with addiction would be better off without it.

Yes, maybe SOME people manage without The Drug just fine. But those are not the kind of people the person with addiction is. The person with addiction is DIFFERENT and they NEEEEEEEEEEEED The Drug.

No substitutes acceptable or accepted.

Not now, anyway.

Yes, well, it's possible The Drug might go away altogether someday, and that would be horrible, but THIS IS NOT THAT DAY.

And the person with addiction is gonna go right on doing whatever it takes to get The Drug.

And blaming and shaming everyone and everything that increases the difficulty of successfully getting and using The Drug for their own misery.

Yep, it's exactly like that. I'm-a havin' those flashbacks.

And I know how this ends, eventually. One of two ways, anyhow:

1. Person with addiction gets some kind of help, treatment, support, etc. and gets off The Drug; or

2. Person with addiction eventually dies of some addiction-related consequence.

So there we are.

Shall we go back to figuring out who's to blame for $5 a gallon gas?

Or shall we start investing in our own independence from fossil fuels?

We keep getting offered this choice.

Our track record on making it ain't too great, though.

wearily,
Bright

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216461426

What a demented word salad.

[USA4ME]

"Blah, blah, blah..." it says while typing away on a computer made from petroleum products.

Hey TygrBright primitive, you first. Log off and stay off!

Oh, and Biden and Dems are to blame for high gas prices.

.

[67 Rover]

Wut? 

[SVPete]

  OMG!

                                                            

Right now, the "free/Western/industrialized/whatthe****ever" world reminds me of a person with addiction who walked all unknowing into an intervention session.

And they have NO plans to give up The Drug.

OK DU-Genius TygrBright oil and gas are EEEEEeeeeeevile. Got it. So, what will replace oil and gas in motor vehicles? EVs? With limited range per charge and Long charge times? Oh, and the charging ... with electricity generated by coal, oil, and natural gas?

Maybe solar farms that stop producing when the sun sets or when it's cloudy? And require vast areas of land?

Maybe wind farms that stop producing when the wind is too calm or when the wind is too strong (for safe operation)? And require vast areas of land? And shred birds? And have blades that wear out in 20-30 years and are not recyclable?

Going a little deeper, how will US transmission line capacity get doubled or tripled to accommodate the huge increase in electricity demand from all those EVs? Ohm's and Watt's Laws are very unforgiving. So, lots more steel needed, lots more aluminum needed, and lots more copper needed (and millions of pole transformers, and house electric service doubled for 10s of millions of homes).

Mocking what you hate is cheap and easy, DU-Genius TygrBright. Solutions are not, and there are none acceptable to a Prog (nuclear power = bad, in ProgLand).

Now I'm going

                                                            

But I'm just pointing out realities Proggies don't want to know or be known.

[BannedFromDU]

 
     Nothing says "liberal" more than proposing multi-decade, expensive, and inefficient solutions to exigent circumstances. Wind power makes zero sense, as the technology to create, install, and maintain the wind farms is more expensive than the value of the power they generate. Solar power is not yet efficient or practical enough. And it only takes a little searching through the scores of historical DUmmy threads to see plenty examples of "but I need my truck to drive down to the post office in, which is 25 miles from the broken-down trailer I live in on my uncle's property."

     I can still recall the DUmmy outrage at gas prices under Bush. He was PERSONALLY responsible for them. Remember, DUmmies? Well, guess what? Dear Loader owns gas prices NOW, and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it.

[DefiantSix]

     Nothing says "liberal" more than proposing multi-decade, expensive, and inefficient solutions to exigent circumstances. Wind power makes zero sense, as the technology to create, install, and maintain the wind farms is more expensive than the value of the power they generate. Solar power is not yet efficient or practical enough. And it only takes a little searching through the scores of historical DUmmy threads to see plenty examples of "but I need my truck to drive down to the post office in, which is 25 miles from the broken-down trailer I live in on my uncle's property."

I might have more interest in changing over to "electric" vehicles if the arguments from the leftist scum proponents weren't disingenuous on their face.

Want proof of this? Ask yourself: "why is it that electric vehicle proponents are exclusively in favor of battery-operated vehcles, and completely ignore other power options, such as hydrogen fuel cells?" In the late 90s - early 2000s, GM (before it became Gub'mint Motors under Comrade Reggie Love's Li'l Bitch) was well on its way to perfecting fuel cell technology, lacking only the refueling infrastructure that would enable it to match most of the advantages internal combustion holds over batteries.

And yet, we hear nothing about it these days. Why? I would submit that "environmental benefits" of electric cars (ignoring for the moment the greater ecological damage done mining lithium and other exotic materials used in their construction) are only tangential to the core reason our "leaders" in government are doing everything in their power to cram them down our throats. I would further submit that their actual core reasoning is more in line with the reasons they continually push incremental additions to the body of gun control laws/regulations: if we knew what they were actually doing "in our name" they would be rounded up and SHOT. By promoting battery powered vehicles, you force the consumer to accept with it the dependence on the power grid for mobility, and to accept that for an incredibly short range imposed by limited battery life, you also have to sit on hold for hours in order to recharge - assuming the powers that be deign to permit recharging at all.

In short, prevalence of battery operated electric vehicles prevents things like this truckers protest currently en route to the Cess Pool on the Potomac, and so ineptly mis-managed by the bureaucrats in Ottowa.

[BannedFromDU]

I might have more interest in changing over to "electric" vehicles if the arguments from the leftist scum proponents weren't disingenuous on their face.

Want proof of this? Ask yourself: "why is it that electric vehicle proponents are exclusively in favor of battery-operated vehcles, and completely ignore other power options, such as hydrogen fuel cells?" In the late 90s - early 2000s, GM (before it became Gub'mint Motors under Comrade Reggie Love's Li'l Bitch) was well on its way to perfecting fuel cell technology, lacking only the refueling infrastructure that would enable it to match most of the advantages internal combustion holds over batteries.

And yet, we hear nothing about it these days. Why? I would submit that "environmental benefits" of electric cars (ignoring for the moment the greater ecological damage done mining lithium and other exotic materials used in their construction) are only tangential to the core reason our "leaders" in government are doing everything in their power to cram them down our throats. I would further submit that their actual core reasoning is more in line with the reasons they continually push incremental additions to the body of gun control laws/regulations: if we knew what they were actually doing "in our name" they would be rounded up and SHOT. By promoting battery powered vehicles, you force the consumer to accept with it the dependence on the power grid for mobility, and to accept that for an incredibly short range imposed by limited battery life, you also have to sit on hold for hours in order to recharge - assuming the powers that be deign to permit recharging at all.

In short, prevalence of battery operated electric vehicles prevents things like this truckers protest currently en route to the Cess Pool on the Potomac, and so ineptly mis-managed by the bureaucrats in Ottowa.

    Spot on as usual. I would also add that electric cars have a net negative impact on the environment, given the ecological nightmare created from getting raw materials for batteries alone.

[Tess Anderson]

Cecile the Bore:



looks it

[jukin]

Electr...coal powered cars... so good for the environment.

[SVPete]

At the other end of a car's lifespan, something like 90% of a gas-fueled car is recycled. While much of an EV is also recyclable, the construction that give long battery life-per-charge makes it difficult to recycle, to the extent that the cost of manufacturing a battery from new materials is less expensive than using recycled materials.

Enviros won't look honestly at the costs and environmental effects of an EV (or bird-chopper, or bird-fryer) from mining the materials through operation through end-of-life disposal/recycling. They just see that an EV doesn't burn gasoline and has no tailpipe.

[CollectivismMustDie]

Which is more plentiful as a resource:

Petroleum, or the materials to make car batteries?

[Aristotelian]

Of course they also ignore the secondary impacts of price rises. It's not just private users driving cars who consume fuel, higher costs for truckers will mean higher prices for deliveries, will mean higher prices for everything other than some Amish selling a few vegetables at the end of their drive. Who will be hit hardest by such prices rises? Obviously the poorest, about whom the DUmmies claim to care so very very much.