2008 election

First let's start with the fact that I'm Teddy Roosevelt Republican, an anachronism at best but nevertheless. I voted for McCain in the NY prinaries. All was good until he (or the neo-cons) picked Palin. This woman barely finished college where she got an MRS. She went to three different colleges and entered a lot of beauty contests. Her selection made me consider Obama. Like Colin Powell, I feel there are qualities in Obama that make him the best choice for this time.

One of the problems with global warming is that asphalt parking lots absorb huge amounts of heat on summer days creating microclimate heating. I hate to park my car in the sun especially when I go food shopping and buy frozen food which can melt on the way home because of the heat in the car. What if: parking lot could be covered with a roof of PV solar panels. If the average parkinglot is about an acre, it could produce about 700,000 watts a year, maybe not enough to power all the stores but when sold back to the local utility it would pay for itself in a matter of a few years. There would be little or no need for snow removal in areas where this is a problem. Maintaing the parking lot would be reduced because of the protection from the weather. No rain, no ice, no snow and all that electricity.

$4 a gallon gas coming to a station near you

It's on its way folks. 4 bucks a gallon! Are you still loving that 12mpg suv? That's 33 cents a mile, just in time for a nice long summer vacation. Let's see, a nice trip to say Maine, a thousand miles round trip, $333 for gas. Now let's just say you crammed the family into a Matrix, at 33 mpg that's about $80. And you get drive to work for less the rest of the year. But what about the all the room in the suv, and the amenities? Time for the kids to play car games: spotting license plates, looking at the scenery of this great country, fighting with each other. Again the point here is why pay too much for energy. I love it when I pull into the gas station and see some 20 yo filling up an old GMC Jimmy that needs a tune up, the friggin thing is getting all of 10 mpg. For the 300 miles they drive a week they're paying $100. R U kidding me! When I was a kid I had a VW bug that got 30 mpg, gas was between 20 and 30 cents a gallon, so let's say 25 cents, I drove about 300 miles a week, for a total of $3 a week, the same price I paid for a gallon of gas yesterday!

Expunge global warming from your mind, Jeeves

It really is about oil. today william Gray, the hurricane dude, made another pronouncement that global warming is not due to human activity. OK, swell, forget about global warming, I don't give a poop about it, by the time it really kicks in, I'll be dust in the garden. But what about oil? Oil is really expensive to get, move, refine, move again. There are however better ways of dealing with energy. I know the skeptics say that solar can only provide a tiny amount of the energy we use, but wind and conservation can help to use less oil. when I was a kids, my parents were nuts about turning off lights in the house. Today we leave our computers on all the time and never turn them off. I have a 12 year old VGA monitor at home that I have turned on/off probably 3 or 4 times a day for 12 years. It still works great, it's a KDS so we're not talking about some expensive monitor here. why not turn off your computers, lights, a/c, unplug all the transformers, use power strips. I have a power strip on my tv, vcr, dvd palyer. The point here is that I save $$$$ by using less energy.

Looking for oil

The US is "addicted to oil." But how do we as a nation get more oil reserves? Oil companies typically explore and drill, but this method is becoming more costly. Our oil based administration found a way to make it fairer for everyone instead of putting the burden on the poor cash strapped oil companies. Go to war for oil. After Kuwait (Cheney was Sec of Def.) we learned that we could get oil by taking it from countries that have it. Usually this is called imperialism but we prefer to call it (you're choice) "spreading democracy," "fighting terrorism," "finding weapons of mass destruction," "freeing the Iraqi people" (God, I hope I never have to be freed by the US government becasue there's a lot of "colateral damaged" with that. The cheapest way to deal with energy is to find cheaper forms of energy, or conservation, but honestly regardless of all the death, going to war is not cheap especially when you have a rumsfeld, a cheney and a wolfowitz leading the charge.

$3 a gallon ethanol and hamberger

Today an MSN headline reads, "Ethanol may cause more smog, more deaths." Once again Bush is wrong. Ethanol is not a solution to any problem except the importation of foreign oil. Ethanol has already caused an increase in the cost of food because corn is used for both human and animal food. It is also just another hydrocarbon based fuel with the same pollution problems of oil. I realize that all the farm states are delighted with the increase in the price of corn, and I will even concede that ethanol has some use as a fuel, but it is far from a solution to US energy needs. The technology exists to make vehicles more fuel efficient. US auto makers seem to think that raising CAFE standard will bring about their demise. Their demise is due to their lack of innovation and high benefits costs. (Here a national health insurance program would go a long way to helping the US compete globally.) But US automakers control the cars we buy, if they made more fuel efficient vehicles, people would buy them. I can't imagine anyone says when they buy a vehicle that they want one that gets really bad gas mileage. I tend not to be a radical environmentalist in my approach to the problem of global warming, although my lifestyle is radical. I've installed a 7.8 kw PV solar system, I recycle everything, I drive a Corolla while waiting for a plug in Prius to be sold. But small steps for most people would go a long way to solving the problem. But alas more cars with low fuel efficiency that use ethanol is not a solution. Tax incentives seem like the best way to bring about change. I probably would not have installed the PV solar system, if it had not been for the Federal and NYS tax incentives which amounted to about $5,900. But where is the shortfall in revenue to come from? How about we go after the millions of tax cheats and end more of the dopey tax loopholes in the IRS code. And we could stop going to war for oil, and that's the only reason we went to war in Iraq in my opinion. And I'm a vegetarian.

and surely Smokey the bear will bury you with his vajra shovel

nature's revenge