Isegoria

In Say It With Me: Supply and Demand, Charles Krauthammer descrbies “what the Bush search for price gougers and profiteers will find”:

Demand is up. China has come from nowhere to pass Japan as the number No. 2 oil consumer in the world. China and India — between them home to eight times the U.S. population — are industrializing and gobbling huge amounts of energy.

American demand is up because we’ve lived in a fool’s paradise since the mid-1980s. Until then, beginning with the oil shocks in 1973, Americans had changed appliances and cars and habits and achieved astonishing energy conservation. Energy use per dollar of gross domestic product was cut by 30 percent in little over a decade. Oil prices collapsed to about $10 a barrel.

Then amnesia set in, mile-per-gallon ratings disappeared from TV ads and we became “a country of a million Walter Mittys driving 75 mph in their gas-guzzling Bushwhack-Safari sport-utility roadsters with a moose head on the hood, a country whose crude oil production has dropped 32 percent in the last 25 years but which will not drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for fear of disturbing the mating habits of caribou.”

I wrote that during the ’96 witch hunt for price gougers. Nothing has changed. Except that since then, U.S. crude oil production has dropped an additional 12.3 percent. Which brings us to:

Supply is down. Start with supply disruptions in Nigeria, decreased production in Iraq, and the continuing loss of 5 percent of our national refining capacity because of damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Add to that the mischief of idiotic new regulations. Last year’s energy bill mandates arbitrary increases in blended ethanol use that so exceed current ethanol production that it is causing gasoline shortages and therefore huge price spikes.

Why don’t we import the missing ethanol? Brazil makes a ton of it, and very cheaply. Answer: the Iowa caucuses. Iowa grows corn and chooses presidents. So we have a ridiculously high 54-cent ethanol tariff and ethanol shortages.

Another regulation requires specific (“boutique”) gasoline blends for different cities depending on their air quality. Nice idea. But it introduces debilitating rigidities into the gasoline supply system. If Los Angeles runs short, you cannot just move supply in from Denver. You get shortages and more price spikes.

And don’t get me started on the missing supply of might-have-been American crude. Arctic and outer continental shelf oil that the politicians kill year after year would have provided us by now with a critical and totally secure supply cushion in times of tight markets.

In Corn Dog, Robert Bryce explains why “The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine”:

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.

In addition to their findings on corn, they determined that making ethanol from switch grass requires 50 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol yields, wood biomass 57 percent more, and sunflowers 118 percent more. The best yield comes from soybeans, but they, too, are a net loser, requiring 27 percent more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced. In other words, more ethanol production will increase America’s total energy consumption, not decrease it.

As he points out, “What frustrates critics is that there are sensible ways to reduce our motor-fuel use and bolster renewable energy—they just don’t help the corn lobby.”

Justin Fox says that energy independence is a disaster in the making:

But I’m a big believer that words count, and the words ‘energy independence’ are potentially disastrous ones.

To put it most starkly: We could have energy independence tomorrow if Congress simply slapped a huge tariff on energy imports (would $250 per barrel of oil do it?). Meanwhile, skyrocketing fuel prices would shift the economy into reverse, throw tens of millions of Americans out of work, and what oil and natural gas we have left under our territory would be rapidly depleted.

Yes, homegrown energy alternatives like wind, solar and ethanol would get a big boost. But the biggest boom would probably be in mining and burning coal — the dirtiest and least efficient of the hydrocarbons, but one the United States possesses in abundance. Meanwhile, the other energy-importing countries of the world would go their merry way, paying vastly lower prices for oil and natural gas and gaining a huge competitive advantage as a result.

Nobody’s seriously proposing such drastic action, of course. But the scenario above ought to make clear that energy independence isn’t really what we want. What we want is the most possible economic bang for our energy buck, plus freedom from the feeling that a handful of oil exporting countries hold our national interest in their hands.

I can hear the dueling banjos as I read this. From Moonshine Alive, but Not Well, in Atlanta:

“We were under the misconception that moonshine drinking was relatively rare these days, particularly in an urban area,” Dr. Brent Morgan of the Georgia Poison Center, who led the study, said in a statement.

Morgan and colleagues started their survey after four adults showing up at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta had potentially fatal lead levels in their blood.

The patients, all of whom said they had recently drunk moonshine, had seizures, a hallmark of lead poisoning, abdominal pain, kidney problems, ulcers, and anemia.

Lead gets into moonshine when certain containers are used to make or store it. Car radiators were once notorious for producing poisonous brew.

“These four patients made us realize that perhaps lead exposure from moonshine was being overlooked in the emergency department,” Morgan said.

His team surveyed 531 people in the Atlanta area, of whom 8.6 percent reported they had tasted moonshine within the past five years.

Might I recommend lead-free solder for assembling a still?