The Saudis have given their friend Bush another bitch-slap, just as they did a few months ago when the American President had to go begging to the leaders of the country we've been protecting from Osama bin Laden, something which Bush couldn't do for his own country. At this week's OPEC meeting, Saudi leaders say they see nothing wrong with the amount of oil they're putting on the market every day, and rather than turn Bush down completely, they embarrassed him even more by raising their daily number of barrels drilled so little that it makes W look even more ineffectual than usual. (One of the 747-SP 68 planes in the Saudi Royal Family's car pool. Yes, they certainly need OUR money, right? Below, John McCain wants you to make your own caption, Below that, Barack Obama in a cornfield, possibly talking-up ethanol, Below that, McCain and wife Cyndi).
I never thought I'd say this, but: John McCain has a good idea with his proposal of a government-funded, $300 million prize for battery development. OK, it's not enough of a good idea, it's not yet plain who is going to pay for it or who is going to benefit from it. But creating a $300 million prize (paid for, I guess, by all of us) for new battery technology which "should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs and have the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars" is not the worst thing we'd heard all day.
Right off the bat: Better batteries are just one problem in the development of electric vehicles, and the
Japanese are already doing more in that area than the US; in fact, Toyota announced just last week that they are building three all-new factories in Japan just to build batteries for their current and future gas/electric hybrids and EVs. Any new battery development is just one aspect, an important one, but just one part of developing the best answers for our transportation future.
Keep in mind, also, that EVs using hydrogen, methane or other, newer liquid or gas as fuel and using on-board fuel cells to turn that fuel into electricity, batteries are not even needed. See: FLYWHEELS ON 2009 FORMULA 1 RACE CARS ... AND SOON YOUR CAR, TOO on this website.
Meantime, Barack Obama, closely tied to ethanol interests, has not yet flatly rejected McCain's idea, which is something to say in itself. Obama believes a tax on oil company windfall profits should be placed into a fund to pay for the many new technologies needed is the best way to go, arguing that very little of what the oil companies are making actually goes back into the development of anything in the way of true "alternative fuels" and modes of transport. Hmmm ... McCain says "public money for private investment and development," and Obama says, "Tax oil company windfall profits to help develop the necessary new technologies". Now, again, which one is the conservative and which one is the liberal?
Obama is no angel when it comes to this topic. His reliance on advisors who favor ethanol's use is running into a big problem which he should have seen coming: Ethanol is no easy, simple replacement for petroleum in running internal combustion engines; in fact, its use and development for the future has already resulted in higher food prices around the world and the ongoing diminution of ancient rain forest in the Amazon and other places around the world, particularly in Southeast Asia, as corn and sugar beets and sugar cane are taking the place of the natural growth and environment. Want to grow millions of acres of that stuff? Use the now- or soon-to-be-fallow pineapple fields throughout the state of Hawaii, because most all of that pineapple production has moved to the Philippines. Home-grown --- what a concept!
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was told about the possibility of an "atomic bomb" which might end WWII earlier than planned and save, perhaps, millions of American and Japanese lives, he threw the full weight and power of the US government behind what came to be called the Manhattan Project. Entire cities were created in the US with the average citizen knowing absolutely nothing about them or the project. When President John F. Kennedy proposed, to paraphrase him, "sending a man to the moon and bringing him back, safely, before this decade (the 1960s) is out," Kennedy didn't offer a prize, stage a contest or trot out some other sexy-sounding gimmick to develop the necessary technology. Like Roosevelt (who was, like Kennedy, a Democratic president), Kennedy understood the gravity of the problem and the best way to attack it, and put his then-Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson in charge of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, founded in 1958) and the project. LBJ took the assignment seriously, both initially and after he became US President. Whatever NASA needed, Johnson and the federal government delivered and the program, of course, was a near-total success.
Creating transportation systems of the near-, mid- and far-future is a job which only the tremendous power and weight of the US government, and perhaps other governments, too, can take-on.
Spending $3 BILLION A WEEK in Iraq (and we haven't even invaded Iran, yet) is not going to develop these cars and trucks for us, and our country is not even getting the "benefits" of Iraqi oil which we were told were going to allow Iraq to "pay its own way" as we toppled their government, installed a new one, and made everyone there happy, throwing roses petals at the feet of our invadi, uh, we meant liberating armed forces.
(California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger takes a look at an electric vehicle, the Tesla, at a Santa Monica, CA, airplane hanger two years ago).
Click below for more on the REALITY of the McCain $300 million battery contest ...
Visits to European or Asian nations which are not saddled by monumental (and often secret) defense 
budgets (in many cases because the US is paying for much of their protection) make it plain what a society can achieve when their tax dollars, or Yen or Euros or Francs, "stay home". In these countries, taxes actually serve the people paying; free health care, free education through college levels, subsidized, inexpensive and advanced public transit systems which make cars for city-dwellers unnecessary and much, much more. Private cars are so, frankly, unnecessary in Japan, for instance, that the government and car-makers work in concert on several programs which "prime the pump" of their domestic auto industry, including super-expensive "inspections" which make it cheaper to buy a new car rather than keep an old one (and the "old" ones, usually just two to three years of age, are often shipped to Southeast Asia for sale; the oldest ones are taken apart and the parts shipped as replacements and spares worldwide, including to the US). (John McCain poses with Fresno (CA) County Sheriff officers).
McCain is also proposing stiffer fines for automakers who skirt existing fuel-efficiency standards, as well as incentives to increase use of domestic and foreign alcohol-based fuels such as ethanol. In addition, a so-called Clean Car Challenge would provide U.S. automakers with a $5,000 tax credit for every zero-carbon emissions car they develop and sell. All good ideas which would probably be on the list of any presidential candidate, at least until the auto industry lobbyists get their fangs into them, especially that part about "stiffer fines". One question: Does his phrase, "existing fuel-efficiency standards" mean the ones in effect now, or the ones planned to go into effect at some time in the future? ("So, see, this guy, he's a farmer, right, and see this traveling salesman knocks on his door and his daughter answers ... Oh, hey, Senator! Wait a minute for the punchline, ok?!" Governor Bill Nelson is the Democratic governor of Florida).
McCain's plan makes some sense; the kind of thing which, upon first hearing, sounds great. After all, proponents will argue, the multi-million dollar prizes offered the past few years by DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has resulted in the development of autonomous land vehicles which can find their way from place to place with no humans on-board (you can watch this, too, on PBS or Discovery Channel or the Military Channel, the Pentagon's own personal PR outlet).
But it's a tougher job to develop these land vehicles than it's been the autonomous flying vehicles which the armed forces of the US and Israel and others are using to dramatic effect; you don't run into boulders in the sky, you don't have to cross ancient, dry river beds and you rarely need to find your way when coming to a crossroads with the directional signs changed while in the skies above. (Entries and winners in the DARPA challenge form the Pentagon, this one a Hummer outfitted for autonomous desert driving).
And the DARPA contests have not challenged participants to run cars and trucks on, for instance, 
electricity made from hydrogen fuel cells or use any other "alt fuel" systems. Even DARPA knows how far to realistically push contestants, even with millions at stake.
What McCain and Obama both show in their approach to what is rapidly becoming the single most important question of their campaigns and what the country most needs now ("It's the economy, stupid!" is all based on the price of oil, at least in this election) is that developing these systems is a complicated, long-term job which is not going to respond automatically to any gimmicky "prize" or "competition". (Barack Obama stops traffic, while DARPA entries contain a VW Touareg, and an autonomous motorcycle, no less).
That's what many made of McCain's boondoggle of suggesting a "vacation" from federal fuel taxes during this summer's driving season (and when was John McCain made president for this summer?). Those taxes are one of the few ways America has of funding the upkeep of the country's infrastructure, especially the Interstate Highway System, costs which will need to be made-up from somewhere else in the budget, and costs which analysts say would result in a savings for the average gas- and diesel-buyer of about $30 over the entire summer. Not worth the cost or the hassle.
McCain supports off-shore drilling and the opening-up of the Alaskan area known as ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) for exploration and drilling, with no proof that the reserves, if any, would provide anymore than six months worth of oil for the US' demands. Obama has remained in favor of existing law blocking the oil industry from acquiring those areas for drilling. We were going to say that anyone who has ever appreciated a beautiful coastline would naturally oppose offshore drilling, especially those who have seen the effects of a coastal spill or leak or blow-out. But then we remembered that Bush's brother, Jeb, the governor of Florida, supports his bro on this one.
Obama agrees with oilwatchdog.org, which said today that, "Today's Congressional hearing on oil 
speculation sounded like an admission that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. Big guns in the financial industry told Congress that simply regulating out-of-control energy markets could drop the price of oil by up to half".
Americans now find that one of the results of the Reagan "era of de-regulation" is that the "Wall Street speculators" blamed by both the Saudis and President W (which some see as a not-very-hidden code for classic anti-Semitism) are able to do their bidding and buying in unregulated markets with American dollars, on which most of the oil trade is still based. Regulating these markets, or allowing only oil into the country which has been bought from US-regulated markets would, apparently, prove a boon to consumers.
Today's International Herald Tribune, in a piece about Obama's plans for alt fuels, says, in part:
"Nowadays, when Obama travels in farm country, he is sometimes accompanied by his friend and 
surrogate, Tom Daschle. A former Senate majority leader from South Dakota, Daschle serves on the boards of three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online job description, "he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy."
Obama's lead adviser on energy and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy Policy, an initiative associated with Daschle and with Bob Dole, also a former Senate majority leader and big ethanol backer, who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, or ADM.
Not long after arriving in the Senate, Obama himself briefly provoked a controversy when he twice flew at subsidized rates on corporate planes of ADM, which is the nation's largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state". (End of IHT story). (Above, John McCain practices to play Charlton Heston in the famed "Red Sea" scene from The Ten Commandments; Below is the winner of the DARPA contest from General Motors and Caterpillar, then McCain speaking this past week ... in Canada ... CANADA!??! What the hell for?).
McCain flies on a corporate-owned plane throughout the country (and even in and out of it) and has for years, and done so legally. In the McCain-Feingold Act which was going to "revolutionize campaign financing," one senator made sure there was a rider in the bill which allowed office-holders to use a private or corporate plane if it were owned by a family member and the office holder reimbursed (at a low rate) the owner. Who put that into the bill? Senator John McCain. Who owns the private planes McCain is often seen hopping on and off of? His wife, Cindy, and the beer distribution company left her by her dad.
In the meantime, McCain, in remarks at Fresno State University in California, today, said the $300 million cost for his proposed prize would equate to $1 for every man, woman and child in the country, "a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency".
Is this McCain's idea of "small government"? The truth is that both McCain and Obama are "big 
government" guys; McCain is a proven, socially conservative big government grandstander when it suits his goals (maybe he expects his wife, Cindy, and her dad's beer money to pay the $300 mil, like she does for everything else in their family) and Obama knows that in the 21st century, there simply is no other kind of government than big, but its most important attribute is that it be as open and transparent as possible.
Finally, if the McCain contest were put into effect, and some person or company "won" the $300 million, who would own the patent? And who would benefit from the enormous fees which such a patent would no doubt generate? See, these things ain't as easy as they seem ... at first ...
We can only hope that the auto industry never has a better friend in the White House than George W. Bush, whose long-time Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, served as the lobbyist-in-chief for the auto industry before taking his White House gig, serving chiefly as the gate-keeper to his boss in the Oval Office. We also hope that Americans, in the future, will tend to steer away from putting two oil industry executives/employees into the country's two top offices for eight years.
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