Who Needs OPEC?

If this is even half true, it's going to completely change US relations with the Middle East.

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

Whatcha wanna bet the Party of the Donkey will try to block drilling, preferring to cozy up to people like Bashar al-Assad and Ahmadinnerjacket?

Automotive X-Prize Offered

The folks who launched the successful X-Prize for a vehicle entering space twice within a 2-week period have recently announced a new X-Prize, this one for a non-petroleum-based automobile.

Despite the typical lefty claptrap on their website about global climate change and such, I think this is a good idea. Privately-funded competition has given us most of the innovations we enjoy today, although it wasn't offered as a prize until recently. No one promised Edison a prize for developing the light bulb, but he knew he could make money from it, so he did it.

It'll be interesting to see what ideas come out of this X-Prize, too.

It's Warming Over the Barbecue

Hot (no pun intended) on the heels of NASA announcing that they are "revising downward" a number of statistics that had been used to "prove" global warming comes another bombshell:

The importance of network standards and accuracy emerged as a concern after economics professor Ross McKitrick charted a dramatic, worldwide closure of fully one-half of the planet’s surface temperature measurement stations from 1989-91. Those closures -- and the limitation of data that resulted -- resulted in a statistical artifact -- the “hottest decade ever!” according to agenda-driven alarmists -- of an apparent jump in global surface temperatures in the 1990s. Not a warming trend, mind you, but a sudden shift upward. As it turns out this in all likelihood is simply a product of having closed thousands of cold-weather latitude stations, at a time when for example the Soviets/Russians found themselves with bigger things to worry about than maintaining Siberian thermometers, such as a collapsing empire.

So the enterprising Mr. Watts, a TV and radio meteorologist, began taking a closer look here at home. Watts put out a call for individuals to photograph each of America’s 1221 surface stations. As the first snaps came in Watts noticed a preponderance of ridiculously sited temperature apparatuses which common sense would dictate factored in a warming bias among the U.S. network (which, remember, is the world’s least unreliable).

It seems fair to conclude that siting thermometers in Arizona parking lots, overhanging black asphalt pads, near cell towers and hot-air blowing air conditioner exhausts or next to trash burn barrels has to result from either a complete breakdown of scientific discipline or an intent to skew the data to produce evidence of global warming.

But what can you say about setting one just away from a chimney directly above a Weber barbecue grill? That’s just what they did in Hopkinsville, KY. These practices would be hilarious if they didn’t result in large amounts of corrupted data upon which our policymakers desperately seek to base an energy scarcity regime.

Looks like Emperor Algore has no clothes... again!

Ethanol and Food

Looks like certain people are getting the idea that pushing ethanol isn't a magic solution to all of our problems. Turns out there's some side effects that were entirely predictable, but that short-sighted politicians in search of sound bites apparently ignored... or they just didn't think the problem through.

It takes over 450 pounds of corn, enough calories to feed one person for a year, to produce 25 gallons of ethanol. Pressures on world food crops caused by increased ethanol production mean higher world prices for both processed and staple foods.

While ethanol subsidies and mandates benefit corn producers, consumers, especially those in poor countries, are hit with the shock of much higher food prices. The World Bank estimates that nearly 3 billion people live on $2 a day or less. Consider the devastating impact of the increased cost of staple grains.

Rolling Stone magazine recently nailed the problem in an article by Jeff Goodell, "Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles." Goodell says, "The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective [behinds] and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after 'solutions' that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn."

I dunno which is worse, if politicians wouldn't think the problem through and realize that pushing ethanol will take corn away from the food industry, or if they knew it and ignored it.