Although the president is receptive to the utilities-first approach, he has also made clear that he’ll settle for much less, including a watered-down bill that would increase investments in clean energy without tackling carbon emissions directly. “He recognizes the challenge of 60 votes,”

We voters would settle for much less than the Obama campaign promised. But we get NOTHING. There is no “challenge of 60 votes.” That is a made up excuse by a lazy Administration, or is it because this is a corrupt Administration.

A 60 vote requirement in the Senate is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The R’s did not have to get 60 to push through their fascist agenda. The 60 vote requirement is a corporate tool to suppress democracy and it has been quite successful.

The Obama sycophants are providing another excuse to give the corporations everything they want. But the corporations always want more.

Protect the corporate slave-owners….. Another disgusting manifestation of corporate sodomy? Wealth extraction and the economic segregation of a society to protect existing “corporate cash cows,” at the expense of Life and Liberty!

There’s real reason to be concerned about subsidizing natural gas through the Pickens plan (which would give major funding to creating natural gas vehicles) and turning it into the next ethanol, especially when we know about the terrible consequences of extracting natural gas through processes like fracking.

There is. Mainly that natural gas is a hydrocarbon and though cleaner burning than other fossil fuels, still releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, which is the inevitable by product of burning carbon based fuels. That can’t be gotten around. Burning means combining a substance with oxygen, thus Hydrocarbon, (or carbohydrate for that matter) + oxygen ALWAYS = CO2. Every time.

and it’s all your fault hippies !!

“exasperated” WH blames environmentalists

Calling this a missed opportunity is a huge understatement. I can’t imagine a better set of circumstances for doing something, and the Senate plans to do nothing. After more than a year of thinking about it, and mounting evidence that we have to get off fossil fuels ASAP.

How silly and naive we all were to speculate that perhaps the largest oil spill in our nation’s history would lend some urgency to the problem of fossil fuels. Some of us went further to speculate that all the industry would have to do would be to whip out their checkbooks and nothing would happen. I’m sorry to declare our predictions correct.

Yes Margaret…… Drunks have a tendency to vomit. When vomiting unfortunately, sometimes the “chum” of the drunk lands on the unsuspecting bar patron, who can handle his or her booze.

Liberty for servitude and self reliance for dependence! American values?

Meanwhile protect the corporations to which we are in a state of servitude via corporate monopolies! Corporate sodomy American Style!!

Of course! It’s not the fault of the obstructionist Republicans, the corrupt Democrats or even the spineless leadership. They advanced climate change legislation and they would have passed it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling dirty fucking hippies!

Yeah, it’s the apocalypse all right. Always knew America would have a hand in that.

The dilemma that our side seems not to want to face is that as we make carbon more expensive, it is paid for by the very people we want to protect. Any form of fee, or charge, or tax on carbon will be paid for by the consumer. Paid at the gas pump, to the gas company or to the electric company. The little guys have no alternative. There is no reasonable auto that many could afford; there is no alternative to using electricity; there is no other way to heat a home in the winter. There is no way to take a long trip stopping every 100 miles or so to re-charge the batteries. There is no hydrogen refueling station.

Corporations will pass their costs on to consumers as they do for every cost.

Simply making carbon production more painful to everyday citizens is a recipe for our progressive team being annihilated at the polling booth.

You have put your finger on a most important “consequence” that few progressives and liberals wish to acknowlege and fewer still wish to consider and discuss, greybeard.

One doubts that you will be much appreciated for your dexterity.

There has been little discussion of using LESS energy, but the people whom you mention will certainly be practicing it. The fast-disappearing middle class will follow this example in the not too distant future, but the ruling classes will note nothing amiss until profits start to drop, and then, the political class (which includes the media) will come to THEIR rescue.

DW

The dilemma is America has been “”duped”" by corporations who sell stored potential energy utilized in auto mobiles which waste 75% of the value of that stored potential energy, for decades. Yes, .75 cents of every American dollar spent on potential energy called “petro” is wasted……. Care to calculate that cost of Liberty lost over decades?????????

“Common Sense and Liberty Lost” The “dilemma” is enabled by stupidity where perceived freedom is actually corporate dependence instilled based on a monopolized commodity? Like a King’s corporate colonial…..”Tea Corp?”

All of that is fine and is probably true. It does not deal in any practical way with a solution to the problem.

How do you replace 250 million existing cars? How do you replace gas ior oil furnaces in homes across the country? How does a suburbanite get from their home to their job? We have not proposed a solution that people will buy into because all it is is pain to them. If we had, our team would be getting way less pushback.

Higher prices for energy means fewer trips to the movies, fewer dinners out, less to spend on vacation. Try selling that idea!

Sadly, I am becoming convinced that species mankind simply has not evolved the capacity for comprehension of the reality of climate change and its consequences. We have the science and we have the knowledge of how to at the least modify its intensity and mitigate the effects. But I really don’t believe we have the wisdom and the will to do what is necessary. Sufficient numbers of us remain in denial and ignorance to prevent effective preparations and solutions.

I think we are looking at a huge extinction event. It’s happened before and it is on the verge of a repeat. Sad that this time there is wisdom among us but not enough.

Superb comment, James Joyce, absolutely spot-on.

DW

OT

Some interesting tidbits about Obama from month old article I missed…”Democrat in Chief?” Obama doesn’t care a bit about the Democrats in Congress….he’s fine with a GOP Congress…

While Obama attended four times the number of fund-raising events that Bill Clinton did during his first year in office, he garnered a fraction of the contributions. “He is the worst Washington fund-raiser in the history of presidents,” a White House aide proudly admitted to me a few months back. All of this exasperates operatives on the Hill who are obsessed with keeping other Democrats in office, and who think maybe Obama should be a little more obsessed with it too. “When you go to the D.N.C., his picture is on that wall,” a longtime strategist who is working for a Congressional campaign told me. “There’s a reason.”

Obama emerged from the campaign having assembled what was essentially an alternative apparatus to the party itself — a closely guarded, state-by-state list of more than 10 million names, many of them door-knockers, phone-bankers, letter-writers and small-dollar donors. This network, loyal to the president but not necessarily to his party,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13midterms-t.html?pagewanted=7&_r=1&ref=magazine

Twenty years ago the scientific modelers told us that if we stopped all energy use then, the damage had already been done and couldn’t be undone, and even without belching out any more carbon, in 50 years the oceans would rise too much, the ice caps and glaciers will have disappeared, and most regions would be uninhabitable for humans.

No one in politics would tell us the truth if the truth were only about disaster and catastrophe; and no one in politics can do anything about non-political ‘issues’, can they?

People don’t seem to know what ‘air’ is. Or what the ‘atmosphere’ is. The atmosphere we live in isn’t very big. If you stood it on its side, it would extend from your driveway to the mall; it’s less than 20 miles. The air from your nose to the clouds is a compound, full of elements. Whatever goes into the air and doesn’t fall back to the ground or rise above it, stays in it. You can’t clean it like it’s a window. You can’t do anything to make it ‘better’.

Every hour it gets dirtier. And it’s more than 20 years past midnight.

The dilemma is why we must screw the environment to sell competitive goods and have a good life style, while the EU – Germany and France – seem to have accepted nuclear and the need to make their population pay high gas taxes, as they subsidize green energy moves.

Perhaps the liberal “anti” agenda needs some prioritizing?

I agree with just about all of the liberal progressive ideas – but it seems obvious we need a “do this first” type of list where we allow then we want to ban – like nuclear – to be far down our list and delayed by decades as we cut carbon.

Not quite

50% is lost immediately (second law of thermo)
25% Is lost on heat in the engine and transmission
24% Is lost for moving a 4000 lb vehicle to transport 150lb of protoplasm
1% or less is “useful work”

75% is way too low high. Try 99%.

Germany has not accepted nuclear. They have embrace Solar.

“replace”

cars – - via mandatory diesel (40% improvement in mileage) plus hybrid and plug-in electric.

Building/home heating – - insulation and better, albeit more expensive, design on new buildings.

electric power – replace coal with the more expensive gas until and if goal gasification – or carbon sequestration – is proven economically doable, all new power to be nuclear or solar or bio-mass (in place algae growth is less carbon – in theory – due to no transportation cost). .

The problem is not having a solution – it is getting started

One wonders how much of America’s energy resources go to the military, which, we are told, is the largest single user of energy on the planet?

The calculus of the ruling class does not include the rest of us, clearly.

However, we do have the consolation of realizing that as the economy worsens for all, save the ruling elite, that there will be less to spend on energy, for most people.

America’s halcyon days are over and the relatively “cheap” energy “costs” Americans have traditionally enjoyed are gone, as well.

Corporations, being “people” too, as SCOTUS has so recently reminded everyone, ought to feel the pain and not be allowed to pass it on – that being the “price” of true personhood.

Yet, we all know that that is not the purpose of corporate personhood. It is a legal convenience, just like corporations as a concept are convenient means of escaping financial AND legal responsibility.

But then, this IS the rge of the Divine Right of Money, is it not?

DW

Fossil fuels $$$ are based on scarcity and demand? AKA Manipulation?? Potential energy derived from salt water using RFW Generators powered from harvested “abundant” solar energy to dissociate the most “abundant element in the universe,” hydrogen from the most abundant element on Earth, salt water might undercut any supply side model, create jobs, provide a clean renewable source of energy with a by-product of clean potable water.

We can create a model based on oil with all its technological innovation transportations and distribution and we as a society are told we cannot break our addiction to oil using “”hydrogen”" because of technological limitations! It cost to much???

Unadulterated Bullshit! Slavery cost to much and history repeats as America is again in “servitude” to the same mentality of corporate slave owners? It cost to much!! What will the true cost be to liberate America from corporate energy whores, or the cost not to liberate from corporation more concerned with profit and cash cows than your life or family!

I guess we know that cost as corporations profit and Americans suffer at the hands of unregulated Bansters et als, who manipulate law for profit at life’s expense!!!

Start changing:

Shops in suburbia among the houses.
Work at home
Loose one car
Get a bike
Public Transportation
Increase density

If there is no gradual change, there will be an abrupt change.

Thank you sir!!! To bad others don’t get it? Must be that sobriety thing…lol???

“When Robert Gates tried to shut down the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in April, the LGBT community didn’t passively accept it, they fought – and took it hard to their targets, namely the President and the Democratic Party. They chained themselves to the White House gates. They heckled the President at fundraising galas. They threatened to cut off all funding. In the end, they got about 30% of what they wanted and they didn’t give off any satisfaction after that.”

As one of the people who was working on the DADT repeal, AND one of the people who knows what the heck was going on behind the scenes, we were close to having the DADT repeal without this foolish compromise up until Lt. Choi and company engaged in their little stunts. That actually made it far harder for us to get the repeal through without soothing the egos of the military chiefs.

Unless you know what your endgame is going to be, the civil disobedience is actually counter productive. You do not know how many people inside the Pentagon me and my associates have heard from who bitterly hate Lt. Choi at this point for making their work on repealing DADT harder, and for making their lives harder as well.

As for cutting off funding? That works. My associate Dr. Brooks spearheaded a ‘warning’ to the DNC by pushing for the LGBT Community to withhold contributions and to not get out and vote in the Mass special election.

It worked right up until Lt. Choi was arrested- in uniform- on a day when we could have had control over the news cycle by making a huge deal out of the scandalous rantings of a homophobic general. Once Choi was arrested, that flew out the window.

Bluntly, unless you have a strategy, the tactics of civil disobedience do not work. Work on a strategy first, and make civil disobedience your last resort, but first thing is first- figure out how you are going to win. Choi and Get Equal have not done that.

Before I get a lot of people complaining about what I have said, I work for the site LezGetReal. I have heard quite a lot from just about everyone on both sides, but I also know the politics behind a lot of this stuff. I have listened to the complaints of our troops who feel caught in the middle, and listened to people who have confronted the military chiefs over their prejudices. I know what I am talking about.

What the environmental movement needs is a strategy and not a tactic, and it needs to jettison those people who have been more than willing to make a huge amount of money off of this.

Right now, a lot of the LGBT activists are pissed off at Choi. He is in it for the money. He has been demanding $7k speaking fees. Those of us who see through him are trying to push him out.

I wonder why???????????????????????

In my lifetime I will never use as much fuel driving my car as a single passenger airliner uses for one coast-to-coast flight.

Okay, those hundreds of millions of cars have four tires on each. When the tires have gone bald, where oh where did all the wear-away go? It leaves stains on the road after it’s evaporated and become new air.

Those cars run hot. What happens to that heat? It rises. Then it cools. Before it cools, it heats up the air it rises into. Who can say what effect that has on the cooler air that had been trying to mind its own business.

James, you are on a roll of pithy and powerful comments …

Carry on.

Please.

(And, thank you!)

DW

Other societies tax fuel consumption highly and pay for social services, especially as health care, mass transit, and retirement subsidies. The US economy cannot increase fuel consumption taxes any more than it already has because there is no margin for it. No one has the extra money. If fuel costs rise at the barrel-head again, the US economy is screwed. Other economies can reduce the taxes, but the US have no high taxes on fuel consumption to reduce. It looks bad, and very much so for the US.

correction noted – France has indeed embraced nuclear – and Germany was in “phase-out” – but Germany’s CDU/CSU and the FDP victory in the 2009 federal election is likely to end the nuclear phase-out – and the result of that phase out has been more coal use – hardly a good result.

But you are correct that Germany is an alternative energy leader via government programs to advance that position.

Most excellent questions (and commentary, between and beyond), AitchD

Much appreciated.

DW

I agree

Why is there no margin for an energy tax increase?

There will be tax increases – some of them will increase the cost of production at least a little – single payer health cuts cost of production and indeed frees up disposable income so it can take an energy tax hit.

This was all predictable from last year. Even the original House bill Waxman-Markey with its cap and trade, free carbon permits, and offsets was a disaster. Then the whole process got sidelined by the healthcare debate and it just was never coming back. When you have Kerry working with Graham and then Lieberman on something, you know anything meaningful is a goner. This just writes the epitaph for it.

This should be no surprise. Neither of our parties is interested in saving the planet. They are there to loot it. Healthcare, FinReg, bailouts, global warming, we see it again and again.

“Why is there no margin for an energy tax increase?”

I can afford big tax increases, but I’m an anomaly. Most consumers are in debt and therefore can’t afford anything already, much less an ‘increase’ in the cost of anything.

Anyway, I’ve noticed some of your posts and comments over the past few days, and they’ve impressed me more than I can say. I tend to defer to your experience and self-evident expertise.

My comment about energy taxes came from my reading here a few years ago (the site is also current):

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2653

(In a follow-up post, I’ll speculate about that 2007 oil-price spike…)

Nuclear fusion occurs outside the closed environment call Earth! Since the universe is built on the hydrogen atom, a symbiotic planetary energy production system mirroring the water cycle would prove beneficial? Hydrogen when burned provides ample energy to create steam? You know “steam” driven “enginators” which produce electricity. Steam which created the industrial revolution???? Are we fucking dumb or just brainwashed into instilled corporate dependence? Monopolies have fucked America as both Jefferson and Madison feared, having dealt with a corrupt king and his cohorts in colonial crime! Bend over America and smile as you are sodomized by powerful monopolized corporate interests extracting life and liberty from you!!!

It’s been 37 years since the first Energy Crisis and the politicians still haven’t gotten the point. Stop relying on them. We have to do it ourselves. Here in Cambridge, MA the Home Energy Efficiency Team (http://www.heetma.com) has been doing monthly weatherization barnraisings since the summer of 2008. Now they have links to about 25 different groups in the Boston area and as far away as Albany, NY and Providence, RI who are doing similar things. If this concept of productive protest goes viral, we can push the legislators to do what needs to be done by changing the facts on the ground.

October 10, 2010 is an international climate change work day called for by 350.org. I’d like to see thousands of weatherization and solar barnraisings happening across the country and around the world. I’d like to see a weatherization barnraising on the White House so I could see Obama DO something rather than just talk about it.

The politicians aren’t going to save us. We have to save ourselves. If we start doing it, they’ll be happy to jump in and take the credit. (I’m looking at you, Ed Markey.)

Word.

DW

maybe there is a message in this Newtism (which is ugly in terms of its subject but revealing in terms of its strategic vision) from the wapo:

No ‘megamosque’ near Ground Zero

By: Newt Gingrich

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

Self reliance Gsmoke!! Screw the slaveowners!! Question is do we have in essence have modern fugitive slave laws protecting corporations??

Given this Congress, there is a risk of a greater capitulation. The price of a half-assed climate change bill could be stripping EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases. We see already who’s running bipartisan cover for this.

The old steam engines were fueled by wood until we used up all the wood. So, then it was fueled by coal. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when it was called The Smokey City, when it was sometimes dark at noon, when a wind gust could kill you if you inhaled at the wrong time and at the wrong place. Of course the owners of the fuel sources we’ve become habituated to are more interested in their success than in your health or survival. We don’t have a society with a king who could banish their asses or sever their heads from their bodies.

people keep asking me if my solar roof is going to be cheaper.
i tell them that is the wrong question.

I don’t know how many times I have heard arguments like this. Oh, if only so and so had not done this, the great deal would already have been done. If only you knew the inside story, don’t bother me for the details, you would agree. It’s all BS. Listen if Choi was able to crash this deal and send a bunch of generals off clutching their pearls, then you had no deal, and nothing close to a deal.

Thanks for the tip.

We are told to invest long term except when it comes to energy!

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.

Err, sorry Newtie, but we have a First Amendment. The Saudis don’t. See that’s what is supposed to make us different from them. Why do you want us to become like the Saudis? Do you like the Saudis? Want to exchange our form of government for theirs? Now I know you don’t have much use for the First Amendment but some of us still like it.

The Administration is consistent. Had the health care legislation truly been comprehensive, it would have linked to where we obtain our food supply. Is it sustainable? Can we obtain it locally? Is there a link between what we eat and health? They passed on that. The health legislation basically referred people to insurance companies.

And they do the same thing now. Should energy legislation have recognized long term climate problems affecting those who come after us? Of course. Should such legislation have made a major push to improve public transportation and rebuild passenger rail systems so that we have an alternative to individual cars? Of course.

But when corporations are looked upon as the source of all wealth, even when they are not hiring, it is much easier to declare that we have natural gas which could be gathered by fracturing the formations, and by golly, we have the corporations who can gather it in that manner. Problem solved.

Well, not exactly. Those wells undergoing such fracturing are seeing significant drop off in their yields after short time periods.

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2290

http://un-naturalgas.org/hydraulic_fracturing_a-z.htm

But who cares? The thing that must never be uttered is that the days of unending exponential growth are, uh, ending. And this pale version of a nothing response enables them to keep from saying that. So, it’s all good.

Rahmbo is going to find that it is very difficult to curse Planet Earth and scare it into doing what it is told.

The choice was basically between helping corporations make their balance sheets look good for a few more quarters, or addressing the problem of making the Earth fit for life forms above and beyond that of slime bacteria in the not distant future.

The choice was easy.

I always believed that people would do the correct thing for the nation! Like all our family member’s who died killing Nazis and the like to make sure this nation survived. Today it is obvious that the corporate aristocrats don’t give a fuck. They are the enemy in my book. The enemy from within as Jefferson warned. Incapable of controlling passion over the desire for endless gross profit! Like that “Asshole” Cheney……..

I appreciate the kind words – during many careers I often acquired the sobriquet “student” – in the process learning how much I did not know.

I made a great deal of money for others but was not skilled in the art of beating out others for higher wages – or even in the art of keeping a job longer than 11 years at a time – which may be part of being the liberal voice to the board room. Now like many over 65 I can not get hired and have adjusted to Social Security – pension funds being invested in safe Citi and BAC (one more area I lacked both expertise and luck in) are now worth 15% of what they once were.

In any case, my economics is out of MIT (Samuelson) with a math degree I turned into a career as an actuary and international and national tax expert (the latter an expertise you lose after about a month out of the field). I am over my head in many topics on FDL – so please pardon the questions.

Again thanks for the nice comment.

Idle speculation: During the last oil-price spike, and following a refinery shut-down in the Gulf of Mexico region (2007?), there was no gasoline to be had in three major Southeastern metropolitan areas: Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; and Nashville, TN. The pipelines to those areas were down for a week or more. Very little fuel was available. What little there was, was consumed instantly, and the gas stations shut down again.

Consumers used the Internet (Google Maps), their mobile phones, and online message boards to keep each other informed in real time with regard to where there was available fuel, and where there was none; how much was available; when more would be available and where.

Gas stations put limiters on the pumps.

The local politicians and the three governors couldn’t understand what the source of the scarcity was. Soon enough, the governors took it upon themselves to hire out-of-state tanker drivers to haul fuel into their states.
And soon enough, the scarcity was eliminated.

I don’t recall hearing or reading about any violence or fuel-pump rage, as had happened in the late 1970s during the two embargoes from the Middle East.

The local people used their digital savvy and thereby avoided a serious crisis.

It’s easy to forget now, but back then (2007-2008) Blackwater was being used domestically as a security force in some places. A military force was re-deployed in the US. Ralph Nader suggested that Bush had clearly threatened either to attack Iran or to impose martial law if the House tried to impeach him.

Maybe the fuel shortage in the three largest Southern cities was an experiment, to test that public’s anxiety level, and to manufacture a crisis that might lead to panic in sufficient degree to warrant military intervention.

So now we know that WW2 wasn’t waged to defeat fascism, but so that the world’s valuable resources wouldn’t be controlled by the Axis powers. You know that a fasces is on the reverse of a US Mercury dime, right? And that there are big fasces as emblems in the US House of Representatives on the wall behind and to the side of the Speaker’s chair?

Did you get to study Franz Kafka? Samuelson’s text was the standard when I was in school. Kafka’s day job as an attorney for the state (German-speaking Czechoslovakia) had him developing a model for worker compensation insurance. He developed a good one, and then workshopped employers and employees to explain it to them. It has been said by Kafka student-scholars that he more or less single-handedly invented the entire modern insurance industry. As a story writer he was obscure, and his influence remains tiny and marginal, but there’s an explanation for that. (He died in 1924 in his early 40s.)

His works were banned wherever the Nazis ruled. They weren’t translated into English effectively until 1947. Therefore, he wasn’t included in English language curriculums until the 1950s at the earliest. In actual practice, he doesn’t show up until the 1960s. Education, like evolution, moves very slowly. Our teachers can only teach what they’ve learned. Knowledge is passed down that way. I graduated from college in 1966, from grad school in 1969. None of my professors included Kafka in their assignments. My students were the first in my evolution to know Kafka.

Had my teachers read him and known him, or had their teachers, we surely would have had a better chance at comprehending our complex world than we’ve had.

Oh, also, Jorge Luis Borges wasn’t made available to English-speaking students until the 1960s.

I was a victim of the fuel shortage in Georgia. We were told it was because the refineries making our formula had been shut down by Katrina. I know there was severe damage to said refineries and do know there are regional formulae. Do you discount this explanation.

Actually I studied Kafk in high school and have since read all of his works. He was indeed a genius and the best writer on totalitarianism I have read,. I am certain Orwell must have taken from him.

You may be interested to know that all of his unpublished writing, a considerable volume, has just surfaced but access to the public is being held up by his family. Link Here.

You’re referring to the late-August, early-September fuel shortage and price spike of 2005. My narrative was about the shortages in 2007 or 2008, also attributed to tropical storm damage and refinery shutdowns. Of course I don’t discount the explanation you provide. I would not discount Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism explanation either, as it would surely apply to both situations.

The Atlanta/Charlotte/Nashville shortages of 2007 or 2008 were mystifying because they were the only regions affected, and the explanations weren’t quickly made available. You or I could have determined the source and cause of the shortage, which was the pipeline itself, had we been given the necessary information. But the known facts weren’t made available until the situation had reached the critical stage, by which time the governors had contracted for outside fuel deliveries.

I was speaking of the 2008 shortages which extended considerably beyond Atlanta, my guess about a 100 mile radius..

Thanks for the link: I’ve been waiting for a lazyway to learn more about the report of Kafka’s unpublished writing. The ‘family’ at issue, according to that article, are descendants of Max Brod’s secretary. It’s not Kafka’s family. He had no heirs; his sister Ottla died at Auschwitz in 1942, and his two other sisters also perished in German concentration camps. In one of his ‘published’ diary notes of 1921, Kafka wrote that all his diaries are being given to Melina (Jesenka-Pollak, a Czech writer who was living as a married woman in Vienna). Milena died in 1944 in a German concentration camp.

Okay. Charlotte, North Carolina is within that 100-mile area, but Nashville is a ways farther. Those three metropolitan areas are the three largest in the Southeast. Those three metropolitan areas were the only areas anywhere (east of the Mississippi) that had the shortages. The reason (source) was known but not made public, except in the usual general way, i.e., storm, refineries, pipelines. Consequently, everyone waited for further developments. There were none. A day became two days. Then it became a week.

good ideas, thanks.

to clarify, I meant as to Atlanta there was a radius of up to 100 mi which included what we now consider exurbs. It lasted about a couple of weeks. Charlotte is over 200 mi from Atlanta and I don’t have a sense of how far from inner city Charlotte or Nashville it extended. I have to admit I took them at their word as to the reason but was somewhat taken aback at such an extreme shortage, even worse than in the 70s..

Okay the point is, we have a weak WH, it won’t stand up to obviously racist which hunt/character assassinations, yet they wondering why we won’t cheer for his milk toast achievements.

Because they are milk toast achievements, they aren’t even trying very hard.

We had one GLIMMER of hope when the House rejected the initial one page Bank Bail Out.

Ever since that point its been disappointment after disappointment. If we wanted policy that didn’t go far enough we would have voted for McSain. Let’s be honest we could have largely gotten stronger reform from a Republican White President and Democrat controlled Congress.

But since the Left has been fighting Obama on every policy position and getting no where, the narrowly focused bill is a surprise?

It shouldn’t be. The Banks will bring down the economy again, its not a matter of why now, it know how it will happen, its just will. We know Health Care will have to be revisited again (like in Germany) because it doesn’t solve the problem of cost control. Cost Control to the Right is called Rationing.

So its hopeless to get anything done with a weak Senate Leader like Reid, how do we remove him?

In fact I’m just going to ignore the whole thing. I have to vote for Boxer and Brown, come 2012, if I’m still here, maybe somebody to primary Obama since we won’t have another shot at Reid until 2016.

White House blames Environmentalists for not convincing Republicans to vote for clean energy!! The White House couldn’t bring their own party-Blue Dogs- to support an Obama campaign PROMISE, that 70% of Americans wanted, the public option!

Because of the very large populations living in the Southeast and Southwest, the demand for coal in those regions is greater in summer than in winter. The largest coal-firing plant in the Western Hemisphere is Plant Scherer near Macon, Georgia. From John McPhee’s extraordinary “Coal Train” (2005):

“Plant Scherer burns nearly thirteen hundred coal trains a year – two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming. It unloads, on average, three and a half coal trains a day.” It burns up one coal train’s load in eight hours.

That’s the kind of scale we tend to find incomprehensible, like the measure of a trillion anythings.

And (also from McPhee’s work):

“Damon Woodson, a mechanical engineer at Plant Scherer who had worked in a nuclear power plant, said,
‘I never really understood nuclear until I came here.’ That million-ton pile on reserve in the train loop was equivalent to one truckful of mined uranium, he said. ‘The way to go is nuclear if you want to have power. To get a million BTUs, fuel oil costs nine dollars, natural gas six dollars, coal a dollar-eighty-five, nuclear fifty
cents. We’ll see how it all turns out’.”

That’s just money cost. What would we choose if any of it were free for the taking?

your missing something…..