imagigami

I will tell you that one thing I learned in college back in the day was that the U.S.A. was in tremendous denial apropos the cost and allocation of energy resources.

This prescient knowledge was affirmed in the nineteen-seventies when we were forced to buy gasoline on an even day, or an odd one. I’d just moved home from Gainesville, Florida and I discovered I could cheat. My new California license plate was a lucky seven-eleven and my last year’s Gator tag was a perfect ten. That meant I could wait in line for gas any day of the week.

We had a chance, because Jimmy Carter encouraged us, to set the bar substantially higher in the department of domestic miles-per-gallon. Good old U.S.A. know-how could easily have invented technology thirty years ago to neuter and spay OPEC. Alas, the spawn of petro-politics has been terrorism.

And the fact that our esteemed, fucking Congress voted yesterday, in December of 2007, to er, begin pushing closed the barn door, big deal. Rue the fortune in blood and treasure we’ve paid to foreigners these last thirty years to protect a species we wish had long gone extinct, the North American Redneck Roadhog.

I am also very, very dubious about the plug-in automobile. Once upon a time I saw some math that compared the installed horsepower of all the millions of cars on the road to the mega-watt potential of our stationary power sources. My recollection is that the cars blew-out the power plants by at least an order of magnitude. I'm willing to revisit the calculation, but we know that electricity is already in short supply.

How the heck you gonna plug-in your Lexus and find enough juice to suck so you can roll two-tons of fun down the freeway tomorrow morning? Another thing, who’s talking about the electricity bill at the end of the month? Like, nobody!!

Why trade your gasoline bill for your electricity bill, when you can have both? Not to mention mercury and radioactive spew from the coal we’ll burn to save some oil barrels and exhaust-pipe emissions.

If we’d done what President Peanut told us to back in the days of our Bicentennial of Independence, we’d have independent cars nowadays running on roasted peanut-vapors, grain alcohol and vermouth.

Summary: In the realm of energy cost and allocation there may be no free lunch, but at least here at home there's plenty of free dumb.