Who pays the transportation costs? Everyone. Even if they don't realize it. And some people, like Pickens gets it before the rest of us have a clue. Soom people seem divorced from reality, when it comes to the costs of energy mandates and policy.
T Boone Pickens is crazy smart. He knows what he is doing. Wind was never going to produce the kind of output that we needed to be sustainable and clean. But subsidies, boneheadedly ignorant as they sometimes are, always produce profits for somebody.
-- Edited by catahoula on Friday 19th of November 2010 04:27:30 PM
It's too complicated for me to explain in a few paragraphs but Natural Gas and Clean burning Diesel is totally reshaping the transportation industry for trucks in CA.
For better or worse.
It's a great idea. Unfortunately, the rules and restrictions put into place several years ago were designed by a team of "experts" (many not in the industry of transportation) who came up with a deadline for long and short haul trucks to be "clean".
Who doesn't want that?
Problem is that these trucks that companies and independent contractors own are extremely expensive and would have to be replaced or be cited.
Another problem is that the science behind the "cost savings" as well as "emissions improvement" is based on faulty science. Emissions of trucks were based on a 65 mile per hour speed for truck drivers, when in reality, these trucks can't exceed 55 miles per hour on our freeways.
You guessed it. It's the whole "lies, damn lies and statistics" argument.
This bill was approved in 2006. Guess when the first clean trucks had to be in place in CA?
October 2008. You may remember that timeframe, when jobs were being lost, when stocks took a dump and the housing market finally went poof.
A good time for businesses to be struggling with new investments? Not so much. People being laid off left and right, and now they have an expensive new compliance cost which may or may not be based on faulty science
Not easy for them to recoup their costs when suddenly the demand for merchandise went down, as people began feeling the effects of this new depressed economic cycle.
I actually think that in California one of the reasons why industry hasn't boomed back as quickly is because of this law. Everything is transported. Your food, clothing, medicines, consumer goods, lumber for construction...
This rule hit CA, which has one of the largest ports in the US. Even things that come off a steamship line from China have to be transported - rail or truck.
Who pays the transportation costs? Everyone. Even if they don't realize it. And some people, like Pickens gets it before the rest of us have a clue.
T Boone Pickens is crazy smart. He knows what he is doing. Wind was never going to produce the kind of output that we needed to be sustainable and clean.
Ah, its coming back to me to busdriver... the profitablility of those fans was apparently dependent on Texas giving him something, I think. Anyway, they didn't and he didn't.
I'm good with the gas, myself, but I suspect one of Boone's cups has regulatory mandate under it. I mean, he's one of those guys O probably had in mind when he said "at some point, you've made enough money". :)
-- Edited by catahoula on Friday 19th of November 2010 02:25:40 PM
Yes, cat, it was T boone who was planning on massive amounts of wind turbines in Texas. Then he recently changed his mind, cut his order in half, and isn't putting any of them in Texas. He was so big on that. I guess he's decided it's natural gas that's the ticket. Don't know if I trust him so much, would like to hear some scientists weigh in on this.
Like Cartera I am also concerned about the fracking process. I agree with poetgrl I think an independent study needs to be done and finally Razorsharp's post really gets to the heart of the matter-we need energy independence from the Middle East.
Pickens is completely right. Yes, he will make a lot of money, but the reality is that he is already a billionaire and really old and the last thing he needs is more money. He is doing it out of patriotism. We are sending billions to middle eastern countries that should have folded long ago because of their horrible cultures.
I am hoping the Republicans will force Obama to move in the direction of natural gas trucks. compressed natural gas is much cleaner than diesel and is a lot cheaper. The only economic reason it has not yet happened is the chicken and the egg problem. There won't be NG trucks until there are NG fuel stations. There won't be NG fuel stations until there is demand from NG trucks. If congress mandates NG, they will come.
I sometimes find him interesting, but I try not to forget that getting us to "buy" that the change over in trucks would reduce our dependence on oil by 50% will also raise his private fortune by billions of dollars.
This is not to say I believe he is wrong, just to say that I would like a study done by someone else with my dose of salt.
Did anyone see him on Morning Joe- he claims that if we replaced all large trucks with natural gas vehicles we would reduce our oil dependence by 50%. He claims this could be accomplished in 7 years.
