The end of Airstreaming as we know it?

[mrmossyone]

Originally Posted by CrawfordGene

"I never learned from a man who agreed with me.
Heinlein"

Well, Mr. Mossy, we agree on Robert Heinlein and his point about learning from debate. I didn't agree with Heinlein on some of his politics, but liked his science fiction.

I suggest you read up on the differences between liberal and socialist—they are profound.

I love your Forum name. It's clever and much better than the lame one I came up with. And congratulations on becoming a rivet master.

Gene

I'm with you on Heinlein and debate. I'm also all for you being able to express your point of view even if it is at odds with mine at times. Makes things interesting. However almost every time I have expressed my opinion without any personal attacks, meaness or vindictiveness it has been deleted. Just saying.

We will however have to disagree on what liberal means today vs socialism. Liberalism should be very different from socialism but it unfortunately no longer is. Having been a history teacher, a sociology teacher and a social studies teacher I am pretty well aware of what socialism is. I'm even aware that it isn't in it's intent a bad thing, however it's intentions have, so far as I am aware, never carried over into the practice of it. Heck Marx wasn't even a bad guy, had good intentions, he just didn't know much about human nature.

Also thanks for the compliment and I'm sure I could learn things from you. Have a good one. Hey I just realized I'm now a rivet master, thanks for pointing it out.

[Minnie's Mate]

Blame is certainly not the purview of any one political group. We have had an "energy crisis" for more than 30 years. Yet we still demand gas hogs (my wife drives one and so do I). Laws have been enacted over the years. Mandatory mileage standards have been imposed on the auto industry. We have the acronym CAFE standards to prove it...no single political party loves acronyms more than any other in this country! When those laws were written, trucks were excluded and SUV's like my wife's are considered trucks so hers is exempt. It has the gas mileage to prove it.

Flex fuel is nothing new. Cars have been "green" for decades. When the CAFE standards were enacted, congress realized it wouldn't work and the automakers couldn't provide the product Americans want at the efficiency required so the law allows CAFE credit for flex fuel vehicles and alternative fuels. Every Ford Taurus ever built is a flex fuel vehicle. Every Ford Triton engine ever built is a flex fuel engine. So is my wife's gas hog of an SUV--Expedition (BTW, this one and the last one qualified as low emission vehicles even under California law). This is also why General Motors advertised for months that it had X# of millions of flex fuel vehicles already on the road. Of course at the beginning of the '08 model year they were charging $650 extra for flex fuel Suburbans and Impalas. Then folks caught on that they all are flex fuel and GM stopped charging $650 extra for that little metal flex fuel logo on the rear of the vehicle. But I digress.

Now Honda claims to have a fuel cell Accord. How much does it cost? How much does Hydrogen gas cost? Where will we get enough hydrogen to fuel all the fuel cell cars Americans will want (and we will want them, look how well the Prius sells)? What affect will all that extra water vapor being pumped into the atmosphere have on the environment? Will Phoenix become a tropical paradise? Will Atlanta become a sweat box (some already think it is)?

There is no simple, one size fits all answer to our energy needs and every solution presents its own set of issues that we will have to deal with. A century ago gasoline engine automobiles were considered the "clean" alternative to all that horse poop lying in the middle of the streets of our cities. Now, the exhaust is the poison in the air we breath and the destroyer of the ozone the protects us from the one truly endless source of energy on our planet...the sun. Oops, digressing again.

My son may be that 15 year old that solves the energy crisis. He is 11 and started working on the problem when he was in the second grade. It may take more than four more years though.

[Denis4x4]

"So, Denis, we have different axes to grind. You must have a lot of Exxon stock to have enough dividends to travel very far since Exxon only pays 1.8%, less than the market average of 1.9%. 1,000 shares worth $89,000 this morning will only pay an annual dividend of $1,600. You might look into Canadian income trusts since those oil and gas companies pay a 10-15% dividend. For example Enerplus Resources of Alberta pays about $4,950 on an investment of $48,000 (10.5% on 1,000 shares). That would leave you with $40,000 to invest in something else using my 1,000 share example."

Yes, I have a lot of Exxon stock and I prefer to invest in companies HQ'd in the US. You forgot to factor in Canadian income tax on all dividends paid in the US.

My point very simply is that had we drilled in ANWR in 1997, we would be refining that oil right now. You almost slid one past me in referring to those poor lawyers working for the enviros up against the mean corporations. Wrong, those enviro attorney's are suing the federal agencies and hanging issues up for years. Since they're paid with tax exempt donations and our tax money is paying the justice department salaries, in essence the tax payers are covering the costs for both sides.

Yes, we need to find better ways to create energy. FYI, I have copies of ROAD & TRACK, FOUR WHEELER and PV4 with in depth tech stories written in 1981 on the premise that ethanol will turn out to be a disaster! The further I look back, the worse the future appears to be based on the musings of algore and the global warming cabal.

[CrawfordGene]

Mr. Mossy, I used to teach history too. We seem to have gotten different lessons from history.

And back in the 1800's, people were saying if there were more horse cars, the predecessor to the motorized trolley, we'd be a yard deep in horse poop. Lucky we got motorized trolleys. Sometimes it's hard to sort out the truth from the alarmists.

Canadian income tax is 15% on the income trusts. You can get it back from Canada and pay the same rate in the US (for most people), or just claim it against US income tax. For most of us, it's a wash, so why bother filling out some Canadian forms? Canadians are our cousins and I don't mind investing there. It's family.

The enviro attorneys are suing the feds because the feds aren't obeying the law. That's why the enviro lawyers win so often. If the feds obeyed the law, no taxpayer money wasted.

As for ANWR, there isn't enough oil there to do much for a country like ours that consumes so much. I've been to the North Slope and it's a pretty amazing place and I'd hate to see more of it industrialized. We were so tired we didn't go all the way to Prudhoe Bay and maybe that was a good choice. Having seen the glaciers melting faster and faster all over Alaska and talked to Inuits in northern Canada who see how the climate has changed, I think global warming is a very real problem.

Let's all hope Minnie's Mate's son (or someone) solves this and really soon so I can afford to tow my Safari to Canada and Alaska and it's still cold there (and here too). I think we'd all like that.

Gene

[ROBERT CROSS]

Hey gang...we plan on going to our FIRST Forum Rally this season.

PLEASE leave this political crap here.

[safari57]

Yes to what Robert Cross said.

It is time to go camping and let all the frustrations that have built up dissipate over a cup of something around a campfire......

Barry

[Nuvite-F]

Originally Posted by safari57

Yes to what Robert Cross said.

It is time to go camping and let all the frustrations that have built up dissipate over a cup of something around a campfire......

Barry

Darn right. There are better uses for ethanol than fuel. . .

Cheers,
Nuvi

[mrmossyone]

Originally Posted by CrawfordGene

Mr. Mossy, I used to teach history too. We seem to have gotten different lessons from history.

And back in the 1800's, people were saying if there were more horse cars, the predecessor to the motorized trolley, we'd be a yard deep in horse poop. Lucky we got motorized trolleys. Sometimes it's hard to sort out the truth from the alarmists.

Canadian income tax is 15% on the income trusts. You can get it back from Canada and pay the same rate in the US (for most people), or just claim it against US income tax. For most of us, it's a wash, so why bother filling out some Canadian forms? Canadians are our cousins and I don't mind investing there. It's family.

The enviro attorneys are suing the feds because the feds aren't obeying the law. That's why the enviro lawyers win so often. If the feds obeyed the law, no taxpayer money wasted.

As for ANWR, there isn't enough oil there to do much for a country like ours that consumes so much. I've been to the North Slope and it's a pretty amazing place and I'd hate to see more of it industrialized. We were so tired we didn't go all the way to Prudhoe Bay and maybe that was a good choice. Having seen the glaciers melting faster and faster all over Alaska and talked to Inuits in northern Canada who see how the climate has changed, I think global warming is a very real problem.

Let's all hope Minnie's Mate's son (or someone) solves this and really soon so I can afford to tow my Safari to Canada and Alaska and it's still cold there (and here too). I think we'd all like that.

Gene

Doesn't surprise me that we may have learned different lessons from history, although I don't know which ones you are referring to. Happens a lot. Depends on who teaches you, what books they use, did they write the books they're teaching from, etc. Most teachers are liberal today and were taught by liberal professors, I know this isn't breaking news to anyone (numerous studies and research on this very topic).

As for the amount of oil in Alaska, I believe you would be surprised. 19 billion barrels in Prudhoe Bay, another new find off the coast of Alaska may have as much as 15 billion barrels, another newly discovered field is believed to net 750 million barrels, another of 400 million, another new find off the coast has 1 billion. A new field in Guld of Mexico believed to contain 15 billion barrels. The biggest new oil field discovered though is the Bakken oil field in northern United States and southeastern Canada. It is bellieved to be larger than Saudi's fields containing 400 billion barrels of oil. The Coastal Plain according to DOI is believed to contain as much as 29 billion barrels and 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. New, as yet untapped, oil fields found in last 10 years contain almost 500 billion barrels of oil. That is enough to supply America at current consumption for 100 years.

From current fields globally there is believed to be enough oil at current global consumption to last 2 centuries. Just recently a field discovered in Brazil is believed to be the largest in the western hemispere. There are other large newly discovered fields I haven't mentioned but I believe you get the point.

Now as for global warming and melting glaciers, it's happened before. I believe then it was caused by Caveman and dinosaur flatulence. It is reputed the T-Rex could really let em rip. As for what's on record. 38 of the 50 states all recorded their highest temp's before the Great Era of the fifties. Only 6 reported in the last 25 years with the most current being 14 years ago. Basically the converse is true of record cold temp's. Some more data for you:

When the geologic context is understood, the past century's warming is inconsequential. In August 1997, Professor Henry Pollack and his colleagues at the University of Michigan published a study in Geophysical Research Letters. They estimated mean global temperatures for the last 10,000 years from temperature measurements in more than 6,000 boreholes around the world. Pollack and his colleagues found that the modest 1.0ºF temperature rise recorded by meteorological instruments over the last 140 years is present in the borehole measurements. However, the borehole data also showed that present-day climatic conditions are in fact colder than average when compared to climatic conditions that prevailed over the 10,000-year-long rise of human civilization. The average global air temperature in modern times is 57.2ºF. For 7,000 of the last 10,000 years, the mean planetary temperature was more than 1.0ºF warmer. The warming of the last 140 years is a recovery from a period of unusually cold temperatures in the 19th century.


In 1998 these results were confirmed in the most accurate study of ancient temperatures ever conducted. As part of the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP), research scientists from Denmark and the U.S. Geological Survey measured temperatures in two deep boreholes drilled near the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Although these temperatures were not necessarily representative of global conditions, the climatic history inferred from them was largely consistent with the global record obtained by the University of Michigan scientists. The results, published in Science in October 1998, were ignored by major media in the United States. The Greenland and the University of Michigan findings agree in several important respects. Both show that long before man was capable of influencing Earth's climate, natural cooling and warming trends lasting hundreds and thousands of years were present. For instance:

• The temperature rise seen in meteorological measurements of the last 140 years is a recovery from a cold period in the 19th century.
• Even after the modest 1.0ºF global warming of the last 140 years, present-day global temperatures remain cooler by about 1.0ºF than they were when the Vikings settled Greenland in medieval times.
• For more than 7,500 of the last 10,000 years, temperatures have been higher than today.
• For at least 5,000 of the last 10,000 years, the mean planetary temperature was about 1.5ºF warmer than today.

On Global Cooling(hehheeeheheeeeee):
From about 1945 to 1975, average land temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere fell by a very small amount, about 0.4ºF. This led to wave of speculation concerning global cooling. In 1975 reporter Peter Gwynne wrote in Newsweek, "The central fact is that after three-quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down." Gwynne went on to warn of "profound climatic change" with "catastrophic famines" and said that meteorologists were "almost unanimous" in their view that a cooling trend would reduce agricultural productivity. The article concluded by warning, "The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." The hysteria was taken a step farther that same year by Nigel Calder in an article titled "In the Grip of a New Ice Age?" in the National Wildlife Federation's journal, International Wildlife. Calder warned that "the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."

In conclusion, Sometimes it is difficult to remember that nature operates on a geologic time scale. Human beings have a tendency to take short-term trends and extrapolate them to ominous doomsday scenarios.

Now I'm all for discovering new, alternative, renewable sources of energy but not at the cost of our economy going completely in the tank, far worse than Black Tuesday and it's recession ever was. Nor at the expense of our freedoms. No more new laws please.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

[Road Ruler]

Originally Posted by mrmossyone

In conclusion, Sometimes it is difficult to remember that nature operates on a geologic time scale. Human beings have a tendency to take short-term trends and extrapolate them to ominous doomsday scenarios.

It is true about nature's aggenda but if humans add heat to the formula won't the temperature rise accordingly??

[Glenn G]

Geologic time .... interesting.
200,000 years ,in geologic time is instant. The development of a soil is instant. A bacteria on a substrate like penicillin on agar has its entire history. Thats from inception to necrosis. It annihilates itself in it own exotoxins.
I don't know who is correct or not but the point is if we dismiss good council for dubious speculation, prudence is out the window. I don't know on any particular the factual content and the barring that fact has and who's right and who's wrong. But we are the guardians of America and of children, grandchildren and on and on. For me, I'll choose prudence.

[mrmossyone]

What if the measures that "environmentalists" take to save the earth today end up harming it in the future? You would then think it wasn't prudent to rush into something in order to save ourselves from ourselves. For example, DDT. In the rush to possibly, again I say possibly( as it was never proven beyond a doubt that it even was the cause), save a species from this evil pesticide, the environmentalist were successful in having it banned. The direct impact of that decision has been the loss of millions and millions of lives, many of them being children. You see we were on the path to completely wipe out malaria and thus save millions from that horrible death. Instead we chose to possibly save a nonhuman species and let all those millions die. All variables should be considered before taking steps to solve a problem that may not exist and that may be better for us than the "cure".

[jcanavera]

Originally Posted by mrmossyone

Instead we chose to possibly save a nonhuman species and let all those millions die. All variables should be considered before taking steps to solve a problem that may not exist and that may be better for us than the "cure".

While I understand this view, the big picture in many environmentalists view is that whatever is on this earth has a purpose and the elimination of a species might have a long term effect on the welfare of the human side. It is all a delicate balancing act.

Jack

[wbrownrr]

You go, Mr. Mossy! Thanks for a clear presentation of facts in an emotionally charged issue. Unfortunately, some people don't want to be bothered with facts, or, as Paul Simon put it, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

[gyandell]

You know! All of this global warming is very interesting, but the decline in the bee population is the real concern. Without honey bees we have no future. Global warming, real or not, adjusting or not, one shift of a plate and we're found in an ice bank with fresh lettuce in our mouth. We are dealing with politics plan and simple. Let us not confuse the issue. Newtonian was accepted till disproved and so will e=mc2. It should be our goal as stewards to this planet to do what's best. Not for political gain, but for the technilogical advancement of humankind. Am I an environmentalist. Sure I am. I'm also a capitalist and realist.As long as there is a controlled supply and high demand we are prisoners to the powers that be.