Plumb Bob Blog

12/19/2007 (4:54 pm)

Were We Asleep?

Folks, don’t be too surprised if I start exhibiting symptoms of genuine Bush Derangement soon. I just read about what that idiot, our President, signed into law today.

The massive energy bill makes James Madison kowtow to Gaia, the Goddess of Environmentalist Numbskullery.

Try this out for size:

The law will … require the massive use of biofuels using other feedstocks [besides corn], creating an industry from technologies still in laboratories or pilot stages whose economic viability is unproven. The law says that at least 36 billion gallons of motor fuel a year should be biofuels by 2022, most of it in “advanced biofuels,” not a drop of which are commercially produced today.

With food prices rocketing to new heights and worldwide food stockpiles at all-time lows, we’ve just committed to five times the current output of biofuels. We’ve committed to solutions that are not technologically viable — and research on other possible approaches will now cease. We’ve committed ourselves to a specific volume of liquid fuels that automobiles might not even need 15 years from now, and with a financing deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars. This approach is wrong in every imaginable way.

Or take a look at this:

One portion of the bill sets new efficiency standards for appliances and will make the incandescent bulb — invented two centuries ago and improved and commercialized by Edison in the 1880s — virtually extinct by the middle of the next decade. The bill will phase out conventional incandescents, starting in 2012, with 100-watt bulbs, ultimately ceding the lighting market to more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

Michelle Malkin has a few things to say about this. They’re lousy light, they don’t last as long as they say they will, and they contain enough mercury to poison you in your home if you break one. Sweet. Thanks, Government. I think I’ll start a factory producing 94-watt incandescent light bulbs.

And check this:

The bill’s centerpiece is the boost in the minimum fuel-efficiency standard for passenger vehicles, the first to be passed by Congress since 1975. It requires new auto fleets to average 35 miles a gallon by 2020, a 40 percent increase from today’s 25-mile average.

The only good news here is that some auto-makers are already on the road to producing fuel cell cars, which would easily have replaced internal combustion models naturally, without the government’s aid. So we might get lucky and have the auto industry render government fuel-efficiency rules moot. That’s the best possible result of this. The worst is more bizarre distortions of the market, bigger advantages to foreign competitors, and some American auto manufacturers going out of business.

Oh — the Sierra Club praised the passage of the bill. What does that tell you?

Have you ever noticed that whenever the government mandates a solution, it makes matters worse than before they touched it? (See my earlier comments on this subject.)

What I’m wondering is, why did so many of us miss this, and not make a ruckus that sent our representatives in the House scurrying for fallout shelters?

Believe me, my first letter to the new, Republican President in 2009, should God show such mercy on our nation, will be about repealing this disaster of a surrender to Enviro-Orcs.

Added 12/20: I calculated how much energy is saved by mandating CFL bulbs. Assuming they use 40% less electricity than incandescent bulbs:

Residential use constitutes 11% of our nation’s electrical demand; 70% of our electricity goes to industrial users. Within residences, lighting constitutes 9% of our needs; the bulk of our residential electricity goes to appliances, like the refrigerator and the microwave oven.

.4 x .11 x .09 = .00396. If 100% of our residential lighting is provided by CFL bulbs, we’ve reduced electrical demand by 4/10 of 1%.

Don’t you feel safer now?

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