Comments on: Congress’s Hanukkah Gift

By: Steve Lanset

Steve Lanset — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 03:44:39 +0000

The automobile can’t be fixed unless stripped down to a go-cart. Begin to replace it and disbursed suburbia with mass transit and walkable villages and cities. Raising the federal motor fuels tax. Offset with reduced income taxes. People will make the decisions needed to save money and fuel without meddlesome bureaucratic guidelines. Americans must realize that it is over-reliance on the private automobile and trucks that enslaves us to foreign energy sources, degrades the environment, forces us to police oil-producing regions of the world at enormous cost, finances Islamic terrorism, and impoverishes our economy.

By: David Cooper

David Cooper — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:45:44 +0000

Congress acting on the energy bill in 2007 is truely a Hanukkah Gift. Michigan’s John Dingell deserves a “thank you” from all AJC members for allowing this meaningful legislation to pass thru his committee and get the necessary votes.
Let President Bush know that signing this Energy Bill will be something good for his legacy.

By: Mervyn Kline

Mervyn Kline — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:13:43 +0000

I have been reading that most of the oil we import is coming from Canada. (Since the price of a barrel of oil is rising it has become finanacially feasible to use large amounts of energy to extract oil from land in specific parts of Canada. A very large area of pristine forest land is being removed for that purpose.) Sso my question is why does it appear that most of our oil is coming from countries other than Canada. Is this a false concept, what are the actual facts?

In “the inconvient truth” it was reported that cars manufactured in ‘China’ are so much ahead of the US car manufactured in the US with regard to fuel efficiency that we can not sell our cars in China? Is this true? Why are our cars being manufactured with such high emissions and low fuel economy?

The best way to increase fuel economy is to force the production of the electric car with zero emissions to act as a counterbalance to cars that are not meeting those proposed future emission standards.

Wind power, solar power, and other renewal resources should be used to replace the need for the need of nonrenewable resources. We send our money out of the country in such large amounts that it cost so much to fuel our cars that we do not have the money to repair the bridges that the cars drive across.

As global warming continues can that temperature rise be used to increase the amount of vegetation on our planet and thus the photosynthetic process which removes carbon dioxide from the air?

By: James Glenn

James Glenn — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:35:34 +0000

The new standards are being artificially set by government, not by the marketplace. This will lead to artificially increased costs for automobiles in the short and perhaps medium run. (Look at the premium paid today for hybrid cars.) That means government is consciously causing inflation. This is a tax imposed upon the purchasers of automobiles. So there is a dollar cost for setting artificial barriers. People may still choose to set increased government fuel standards, but we shouldn’t hide the impact.

If we want to send less money overseas for oil, should we do the same with respect to China for all the other goods we import. Should we restrict imports from China until they allow freedom of the press and religion, freedom of assembly, political parties other than the Communist Party, and so forth? China, in the long term, as a communist state, will also be a threat to us, as is Islamo-fascism today.

My preference to becoming energy independent is to explore for oil and natural gas off our shores, in Alaska, and elsewhere on government lands. (Brazil has drilled for oil offshore, as well as developed ethanol from sugar cane.) We can do this in an environmentally safe manner, as is evidenced by the oil we’ve been getting out of Alaska for the last 20 years. We should also build more refineries here, natural gas facilites, coal plants, (inclusive of coal liquifaction and gasification),nuclear plants, as well as more electric transmission lines. Of course we should also spend money on developing cleaner alternative fuels, cheapening the cost of solar power, encouraging conservation and energy efficiencies, utilizing wind power where practicable, and geothermal energy.

By proposing only one or two solutions to acquiring energy–conservation and greening–we risk increasing its cost way beyond what the cost would otherwise be, and the cost to all the products and services depending on it. We also risk its availabilty.