Saddam, did you ever read the article about the soldiers guarding you in prison in GQ magazine this past.. June or July I think? Aside from the murderous side of you, you would seem like a cool guy.

Let me guess. You vote Dem.


Actually, yes. I can be a very cool guy. Without power I can be very humble and polite, yes.

Maybe we could start a write in campaign for Pres in 08. There are so many people there in the states that support or sympathize with my cause, it might be worth running as a write in.

I love LA, I really do, but this is maybe my least favorite part. I am envious of those of you who have options.

There is no real public transit in LA. I have a metro station 1/4 mile from my house, but I've been able to use it about twice in the past year. It just doesn't go anywhere that people go.

Riding a bike isn't an option, for obvious reasons. Riding 30 miles with a Fender Rhodes bungee strapped to the back of a bike might be a great mental picture, but that's about it.

Carpooling is rarely an option. LA isn't like most urban centers, where commerce and industry are centrally located, and residences are set in outlying areas. The sprawling decentralized layout of the southland means that there is very little chance of finding someone who lives within 5 miles of you, and works within 5 miles of your work.

Compound that with the fact that property values have jumped so high, that any new freeway expansion becomes obscenely expensive just to buy the neighboring properties at market value. They are planning on expanding the 23 freeway, a small little 9 mile stretch through a residential community just west of the Valley, and the average cost of the homes that they're going to have to purchase is 1.2 million. Now add up how much 9 miles of right-of-way is going to cost. Imagine trying to expand the 101 through Woodland Hills or Studio City.

I honestly don't know what the way forward looks like for LA. The pressures keep building, to the point where the average person commutes 40 miles a day from the house she can afford to the job that pays decently, and spends 2-3 hours in the car to get there.

I just find it interesting that in this time and age of technological advances that no one can come up with a valid, inexpesive, safe, clean alternative fuel. I mean, come on, why does the fuel we need to use have to include oil as a main ingredient? We can make synthetic oil, synthetic fabrics, so is synthetic fossil fuels really a pipe dream? True, there are alternative fuels such as alcohol, CNG, propane, even electric (although this isn't really a good alternative becuause you still need to generate the electricity to put into the cars which results in putting more strain on the power generators), there's got to be better sources of fuel.

Currently, i can only put $4.00-$6.00 in the tank at a time. I've no stash of money anywhere and I'm counting my nickles. It's really giving me a headache.

As long as we don't run Dem, I don't vote Dem ;)

Physics. Specifically, conservation of energy. Anything we use as fuel has to have potential energy. Synthesizing hydrocarbons is certainly possible, but it takes energy to synthesize them -- more than can be released by burning them. We've got fairly few energy sources available

1) Direct solar. Lousy for vehicles, currently very inefficient for anything else. Photovoltaic solar cells can barely produce enough energy over their lifetime to account for the energy it takes to manufacture it. Large-scale solar plants attract the ire of environmentalists.

2) Biofuels. They work, but they're available only on a vastly smaller scale than crude. And to produce more means to produce less food. Some of them (ethanol in particular) take more energy to grow and extract than released when burning, so are useless as a primary fuel.

3) Nukular. Err, nuclear. Lousy for vehicles. Politically impossible. Environmentalists hate it. And there still is that waste issue.

4) Hydro. Pretty much tapped out, not directly usable for vehicles, and environmentalists hate it.

5) Geothermal. Very few places it can be practically tapped, not directly usable for vehicles. Environmentalists hate it.

6) Geophysical, e.g. tidal powered. Again, few places it can be practically tapped, not directly usable for vehicles, and environmentalists hate it.

7) Good old fossil fuels -- conventionally, solar energy stored in prehistoric times. An alternate theory holds that oil is left over from the formation of the solar system. Environmentalists hate them too (except natural gas, sometimes), but they're too firmly established for those concerns to kill them.

If you want something else usable as a fuel, you either need to find some other common substance with a lot of potential energy stored in it chemically, or figure a way to extract power from some available source so cheaply that it makes sense to synthesize a fuel rather than use refined oil.

So, I gather that Environmentalists and Politicians are the primary impediment. Well we can solve that!

I dunno. We haven't done too well at getting rid of them so far.

What do you reckon...?

damned if you do, damned if you don't.

gas prices have gone up. we spend more on gas. people are still buying big trucks and SUV's. when it really starts to make a signicant difference in personal finances, people will quit buying large vehicles and look at smaller more economical vehicles.

when people find their supply of cash effected by gas prices, demand for gas guzzlers will go down. until then we are just exercising our right to bitch. it is a national passtime.

When you think back to earlier oil crises the big guzzlers took a short-term hit but then came back, but mainly in the SUV stream where the new rules didn't apply - wonder if the change bringing SUVs and such into line will make a difference this time though...

As an outsider, each successive major oil hike has seen mainstream attitudes change in respect of car ownership here, with more emphasis on fuel economy. Even in the luxury end of the market, large cars that years back would be accepted with 12-15 mpg over here are now returning 20+ mpg - the average car mpg is more in the range 35-45 here these days...

Do these things really make a difference? To me, it just seems like more "feel good" actions, giving the illusion that something is being done to better Bush's energy policy. IMO, the real action should take place in the form of getting the U.S. less reliant on crude supplied by countries will are potential enemies. All it would take is one well staged coupe in Saudi and poof, our supply of oil is gone.

Well, eliminating the "light truck" exemption is a good thing. Half the cars on the road now have no fuel efficiency standards, so removing that loophole will help.

But it's certainly not going to fix the energy issues on its own.

This seems to me like the biggest fallacy of most new energy proposals; everybody is looking for the silver bullet. It doesn't exist. There is no single solution to the problem, but there are several incremental and varying steps that will all contribute to a more sustainable policy:

1) increased efficiency of consumption, including home appliances and vehicles.

2) altered habits that rely on less use of energy, such as mass transit use and carpooling

3) an increased efficiency in the crude-to-unleaded production line, so that US gas prices don't swing by 50 cents when a single refinery goes down

4) increasing reliance on sustainable energy sources. No, there's not going to be a single new energy source that replaces oil, but broad incremental shifts to new sources will make a huge impact on demand.

5) some sort of middle-ground on new source exploration vs. environmental impact. Nobody wants to turn the Arctic circle into a teeming mass of bubbling crude, but we need to recognize that there are untapped energy resources that will take 10-20 years to go from discovery to market, and that our need for such resources will only increase in urgency. Is there no room for middle ground? Maybe the environmental groups can actually work with the energy groups to develop a plan of exploration that has minimal impact.

It seems to me that various interest groups back single points of this list, and decry any other move because it's not their particular solution. Increase efficiency in vehicles is bad because it's not pushing people to new sources? that's absurd. Sustainable energy sources are bad because they're not prevelant enough to shoulder the burden of oil? that's absurd too.

We need a broad range of solutions, and we need to embrace them all. There is no one solution.