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Challenge for Hillary Clinton
Dear Hillary,
You keep talking about how you will do something about the price of gas.
I do not believe you.
But I am willing to be proved wrong.
Please show me a detailed plan on how you propose to do this.
Spending money on research is not an option. These research efforts, even if more successful than we can imagine, will not see wide-scale industrial use during your first administration.
Threatening the Saudis, or OPEC, is not an option. They no longer provide the price of oil as they are no longer swing producers. (The US stopped being a swing producer back in 1973.) It is the speculators that now control the price.
You have not talked about using nuclear energy, which, at present, is our only option of generating enough electricity on a wide scale, *today*.
You have not talked about building trains and light-rail.
You have presupposed that we will keep our cars, and have them fueled by oil, or an imagined biofuel -- which is likely to consume as much oil as fuel it produces.
In other words, you have said that nothing has to change, but you will work to lower the price of gas.
Please tell me how.
I am willing to accept arguments from either you or your supporters at TPM.
V/R
Clearthinker
Comments (12)
She is going to hook Obama up to a hot air machine and power half the electric grids in the US.
April 23, 2008 12:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
That would have been more effective had you included Obama supporters in that calculation... and something about manure. ;-)
April 23, 2008 12:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Aw, c'mon Billy, I'm serious! Any ideas?
April 23, 2008 12:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
C'mon, CT, we all know she's going to open the sluice of the strategic reserve and bring world oil prices crashing back to where they were in the idyllic days of the 90s (for about 3 days ;-) ).
April 23, 2008 12:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Love it!
April 23, 2008 12:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here're my ideas. I doubt that Hillary is progressive enough to come out with any of this. But I think these are some ideas with wheels.
Stick it to the fuel hogs. Strongly. If your vehicle doesn't get a certain mpg - say at least 20 or 25 - and it's not a work vehicle, you don't get to drive it on even or odd days of the month, depending on what the last digit of your license plate # is. If it is a daily or semi-regular work vehicle, you have to apply semi-annually for a badge to display on your gas guzzling vehicle, so you can drive it on forbidden days.
You can also cap speed limits at 60mph. Air resistance increases non-linearly as you move from 60-70 mph.
You can also demand that everyone has a car-free day of the week. Saturday, or Sunday, depending on the last digit of your license plate #. Voluntarily, I imagine a lot of people will choose Sunday anyway, and there can be badging &c. to display which day of the week the vehicle's owner has chosen not to drive the vehicle.
Those are just the automobile related ideas I've got.
Practicing scrupulous energy efficiency on a national scale would lower the price of gas significantly. The easiest, most efficient scenario for the provision of service with our current energy infrastructure would be one where the Demand was Constant. To get this to happen would require micromanagement on an extremely localized scale, having various major energy consumers (factories, companies) coming online throughout a 24-hour day, and that's exactly the sort of thing you don't want the Fed to be doing. But you could probably convince Congress to pass a mandatory cap on peak energy usage, say at year 199X or 200X levels on a daily basis, but leave it up to the states & power companies & major energy consumers to figure out how they're going to do it.
Well. Retooling the entire American culture to accommodate a 24-hour day is probably wishful thinking. But the current way we do things is so wasteful that it's depressing, and I'm having a hard time imagining that I might convince many people to go along with this idea. I'm sure it would cause a lot of headaches for a lot of city managers, policymakers, and businessmen.
April 23, 2008 1:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have a list of ideas in the comment section on this thread:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/do-we-have-the-energy-to-talk.php
We agree about the speed limit, but I would drop it to 50 mph.
Enforced anything will not work in my opinion. We have already overtaxed our police infrastructure, this won't help -- and people will cheat.
As you can see from my list, I would simply say "this is what gas costs" and let people use less of it (as happened in the 1970's which things got tough).
Of course, *nothing* in your arguments suggests that the price will come *down* -- and you didn't indicate it would. But Hillary, again, tonight, in her victory speech alluded to gas, and this is getting me irritated.
Creating false hope like this will lead to some potentially ugly scenarios downstream... very ugly when people feel lied to about maintaining their lifestyle.
April 23, 2008 1:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
If the demand for oil everywhere on earth were to remain constant, then those driving restrictions would probably cause temporary downward fluctuations in the price of gas. Since oil is finite, those price drops won't last forever.
And leveling energy Demand to a Constant level WOULD actually reduce oil consumption significantly & diminish the price of gas. Too bad the only way to do it is to turn our culture upside down. The lax step I outlined toward getting there, capping peak energy usage on a day-to-day basis, might have an impact on prices - but I don't have time to go searching for evidence right now.
Will you accept "the price rises about 1/2 as much as it would otherwise," or "the price rises below the rate of inflation" as acceptable outcomes?
April 23, 2008 2:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are going to have to let the price rise to be more consistent with the rest of the world. It's not that we are paying too much for gas, but rather too little.
Demand will go down when people actually have to budget for their gas. That is the only "fair" way where people will grumble, but not outright revolt as a mandate would create (never mind trying to get it through Congress). This will also take the onus off of enforcement.
In other words, people will be piggy until they can't afford to be.
April 23, 2008 4:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think the police system is so terribly overtaxed that it couldn't find some way to benefit from such a federal mandate.
Here's my idea. You get a ticket just like any other traffic violation. You CANNOT be jailed for gross violation; it should me immoral to jail someone over environmental crimes that do no immediate harm. Gross violators will simply have their vehicles taken away. If you're caught driving on the wrong day too many times, and you haven't been paying your fines, the police now own your vehicle. And they can sell those hot wheels and hire more cops if that's what they have to do to get this enforced.
Taking people's cars away is probably the right incentive to discourage gross violation. Cheating might happen, but you can bet people will pay their fines and start to learn their lesson once they hear about someone who loses their maxed out Escalade.
April 23, 2008 2:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Taking people's cars away????
First, we have a hard enough time doing that with drunk drivers!
Second, the public outcry of that would be immense.
I don't know where you live, but every city I know of has an overtaxed police system. And what are you going to want: police fining "ordinary citizens" or making arrests for theft and domestic violence?
April 23, 2008 4:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
It all depends on when you take the car away, and the fine system, and how fines accrue over nonpayment. There's surely a Goldilocks path.
People said the same thing about paying for parking, and about parking tickets once upon a time. But no one is going to sympathize with someone when their car's been impounded and they've got 15 unpaid tickets.
Now that I think about it, the real problem is that this idea is probably a gross violation of States' Rights. You're right, there are tons of law enforcement agencies that wouldn't want to enforce this, and the federal government probably can't mandate that it be done by non-fed agencies nationwide, or field an Interstate Highway Environmental Patrol or anything.
So mostly scratch these off-day driving plans for Hillary, they can only be efficiently carried out by state or local governments.
The only thing the federal government might be able to do with respect to driving is mandate a 50-60 mph speed limit nationwide, gasoline rationing, and maybe an occasional car free weekend.
The Western States that are following California's lead in trying to meet Kyoto might be the places to start pushing for the rest of these baby-first-step lifestyle changes.
April 24, 2008 1:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
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