Lifted from comments: The second coming of Jimmy Carter?

[elfs]

Drill in ANWAR. Drill off the coast. Drill in the Dakotas. Build more refineries and Nuclear power plants domestically. That's the short term solution, giving us time for long term solutions.

Except these will not help. The current Republican administration-- you know, as opposed to Republican machine-- is telling us that all of this drilling will not benefit you or me until the end of the next president's second term. It will never lower the price of fuel more than a few cents per gallon, nor will it address the real issues.

I'm all for nuclear power, except that the current economics don't support the current generation of nuclear power plants. Every single "successful" nuclear plant in the world is government owned and run-- they are not the miracles of modern science we'd hoped they'd be.

If we want solutions, drilling is simply not the answer. Building nuclear power plants is not the answer. The things we can implement in the next two years, aside from continuing our assault on the brown people of the world, is to engineer our way out of the problem. Better technologies, more efficient technologies, more efficient lifestyles, are going to do far more good than this willful "fuck the environment and the future generations, we need to run our SUV's now goddamnit" attitude.

you'd rather support Jimmy Carter Jr.'s bid for presidency and socialist reform.

I've avoided calling your candidate Grampy McSame ("Y'know, Mike, without NutriCal this would not be possible."), I'll ask you to do the same.

Barack Obama is not my candidate of choice. But in the choice between John McCain-- a Great Nation Conservative who seems determined to keep this country on an immoral course ruinously expensive to the blood of our children and the fortunes of their children.

I am far more terrified of what may happen to my civil liberties under a so-called "conservative" regime than under a liberal one. That continues to astound me, but I guess it shouldn't: cautious conservatism has morphed into callous authoritarianism, while modern liberalism seems to be merging with libertarianism. I have lived under seven presidents starting with Nixon. The overwhelming evidence is that my civil liberties, my long-term economic well-being, my nation's standing in the world, and my children's futures have been advanced by Democrats and destroyed by Republicans.

I am not particularly interested in supporting Barack Obama, but you're right, the outcome of my decision is that I'd like to see him elected, because I will do everything I can to ensure the defeat of the current Republican nominee, John "1/20th a maverick" McCain.

A little domestic economic suffering over the next four years, if that's what it takes-- and if that's what it comes to, and argument nobody has successfully made based upon the policies outlined on Obama's website (which, by the way, are often four to eight times more detailed and thought out compared to similar documents on McCain's website, when McCain's exist at all)-- is a small price to pay, really, for the chance to undo the last eight years of malice, mendacity, maliciousness, and incompetence in our civil domestic and foreign policy spheres.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I'm all for nuclear power, except that the current economics don't support the current generation of nuclear power plants. Every single "successful" nuclear plant in the world is government owned and run-- they are not the miracles of modern science we'd hoped they'd be.

First of all, a lot of this is because nuclear power is both heavily and inconsistently regulated. Legal challenges are permitted by the courts to the construction of nuclear power plants which would never be permitted to any other kind of industrial enterprise. The solution is to regulate them by model -- create a process for approving a model of nuclear power plant and, once that is done, make the default that a licensed operator may construct or install that model at will. We already do this with most other kinds of heavy plant equipment.

Secondly, nuclear power is uneconomical in competition with cheap oil. If oil is no longer going to be cheap, then nuclear power becomes economical, even under the current regulatory regime.

A little domestic economic suffering over the next four years, if that's what it takes.

It's not so much that I fear the suffering, but that I think it will be pointless suffering -- it will not achieve any good economic ends.

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

A little domestic economic suffering over the next four years, if that's what it takes.

I for one can't take more economic suffering (even before this latest setback). However I believe that under Obama's regime I'll actually see some economic recovering. Yah, it will be slow, but my greatest economic pain has been in the last 8 years.

I had work when Reagan and Clinton were in office, but I've had the damndest luck during Bush's regime. That trend has been changing in the last 1 1/2 years, but slowly, spottily, and while I've had work, it's been expensive recovering from the lack of it and the compensation for that work is still pretty sad.

Obama's plans will change most of that for the good. The "haves" are always worried about change because it might take away from them. But us "have nots" can see pretty clearly where the benefits in these proposed changes lie.

[tagryn]

* If you're looking for a two-year solution, the answer's pretty simple: build lots and lots of coal plants. We have the resource in quantity domestically, and the infrastructure to mine and distribute it (and create jobs domestically to boot). Also, push for a lot more oil development in Canada (#1 importer of oil to the US) and Mexico (#3 supplier) as well as domestically. While greater energy R&D is needed for a long-term solution, expecting a sudden breakthrough which will solve everything in two years is simply unrealistic, and even the POTUS candidates aren't trying to sell that as an option.

In energy development and production terms, "short-term" is 5-10 years down the road. If we'd implemented things like more nuclear plants and more refineries during the vacation we took from domestic energy issues during the past quarter-century, a lot of the current problems wouldn't be nearly as bad. Still, better late than never.

* I don't think that changing the executive will make nearly the amount of difference that a lot of Obama loyalists are expecting it will, sadly. A lot of the civil rights problems being pinned on Bush had their precedents planted back during the Clinton administration, for example, which leads me to think that most of the problems are systemic to how the government operates and accumulates power to itself if unchecked, rather than the problems being tied to whether a particular party is in power. Until reformers figure out a way to unshackle the political process from the huge amounts of $$$ being pumped into it, something Obama is participating in rather than trying to change, I don't see things getting any better...and one of the few leaders on that front, flawed though the attempt was, was McCain with BCRA.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually it's conceivable incentives for manufacturers of electronic/electrical goods could have a big impact if there were sufficient incentive to produce goods which were more power efficient. You don't need a "breakthrough" necessarily, a steady refinement could be just as good and perhaps easier to keep momentum on.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

What we've seen in the UK, when electricity generation became a matter for private investment, is that there was a shift to small, quick to build, plants using cheap imported fuel. For various technical reasons, these plants often were more efficient, but the big advantage was quick construction and payback.

Nobody is willing to wait through construction on the really large plants which supply the base load, yet wind power is unpredictable enough that it needs more big-power to cover the short-term variation. A big steam turbo-alternator set has the output and the inertia to damp out a lot of variation in other sources. It can take care of a bigger percentage spike than a small unit, and it's a bigger percentage of lots.

So the total system is less stable, and maybe needs a higher-capacity grid system to get power from a much wider area, but that goes on a different company's balance sheet.

Well-run governments can borrow money at the lowest rates on the market, which helps on big, slow-payback, projects. But they also get indirect income: the tax revenue which comes from the benefits to industry of reliable power. Elf: think of what a power cut does for where you work.

Corporate governance seems biased towards the short-term, even more so than the next-election thinking of politicians. But we can name past Presidents and Prime Ministers. How many people can recall as many past CEOs of General Motors?

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Another element in the fuel mess that's not brought up is the Enron Loophole, which deregulated the energy market and made the rampant speculation of the past seven years possible. A loophole McCain supports and Obama voted against, and one which he hopes to close as soon as he's in office.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

...it will not achieve any good economic ends

I don't expect it to.

Economic good is not the only good with which the United States must be concerned. The Constitution (not the Amendments) is full of economic issues such as the interstate commerce clause: any economic damage done by a president must happen with the full counsel and consent of congress, and any damage can be reversed with the stroke of a pen. On the other hand, civil policy cannot be reversed easily; it can live with us for decades, and mistakes in foreign policy like the ones undertaken by the current administration can take generations to undo. We can throw up our hands and proclaim the whole world hopeless, or we can start trying to fix it.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I don't see what good ends at all "domestic economic suffering" will achieve, qua suffering. I do not believe that "suffering is good for the soul."

Some of the proposals I've heard have been especially likely to do needless and pointless harm. For instance, windfall profits taxes on the oil companies will choke off investment in oil just when we are experiencing an oil shortage, driving general oil prices even higher; raising the capital gains taxes will collect little or no extra money and do so at the price of pushing us into a major recession or even depression, and so on. I don't see the good that either will achieve, save providing pleasure for foolish people who imagine that making the rich suffer somehow helps the poor.

[fallenpegasus]

A left socialist president and a lapdog congress...

We're going to have more than just "a little domestic economic suffering". This guy is going to be worse than FDR.

I am now tangentially close enough to the world that funds new companies and new technologies, and they are very forthright. If Saint Obama wins, their money moves to Singapore and China.

Wheee...