One Dollar Gas

"I was directed to the following this morning on NewsMax when I logged on: "Newt Unveils Plan for $2.50 Gas to Kickstart Campaign Comeback" < http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/gingrich-gas-drilling-oil/2012/02/23/id/430411?s=al&promo_code=E416-1 >. It's as typically Republican as it can get, too little, too late, too cowardly, too stupid.
"By contrast, read "One Dollar Gas". Based on leading-edge science and free market economics, it originally appeared in _L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE_ at least two years ago, and is now a chapter in _DOWN WITH POWER: Libertartian Policy In A Time Of Crisis_. Read it at http://www.down-with-power.com/energy.html or better yet, get it in dead-tree or e-reader format at Amazon.com or B&N.com.
"Then contact your nearest libertarian candidate, and get him or her to read it. One Dollar Gas. This is an issue we can win on." -- L Neil Smith

_DOWN WITH POWER: Libertartian Policy In A Time Of Crisis_
One Dollar Gas
Never soft-pedal the truth. It's seldom self-evident and almost never sells itself, because there's less sales resistance to a glib and comforting lie. -- L. Neil Smith

Of all the things to suffer a crisis about, by far the silliest is energy. There is no shortage of energy whatever in America or in the world.

What there is a shortage of -- as usual, with 20th and 21st century problems -- is individual liberty, exacerbated by a surplus, a hideous glut, of mercantilist interference with the free market system. Energy corporations today are unanimous in grim determination that you and I­and those who provide our other goods and services­must be limited to purchasing our energy from them, and only from them.

That's what the wars in the middle east are all about.

Unfortunately, their investment in yesterday's scientific ideas, obsolete technology, and gradually collapsing infrastructure make buying energy from them one of the worst bargains we could possibly strike.

Government has a hand in this, as well. Generally the more energy that is available to any given individual in any given society, the more individual liberty there is in that society. That is probably the reason why authoritarian, collectivist governments (if you'll pardon a redundancy) adopt mythologies that claim energy is scarce or will soon be.

Nor is the essentially fascistic environmentalist movement at all interested in cheaper, cleaner energy or greater human freedom. Their goal is to round up all of humanity in vertical concentration camps called "arcologies", forcibly reduce the population, mostly by lowering the quality and standard of living, clear the countryside (the way the British did in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries), and let it "return to nature"­except, of course, for the dachas of the nomenklatura and their more attractive and compliant peasant slaves.

If billions must die to achieve this Utopian dream, so much the better.

For those with different plans for our futures (and I emphasize the plural, here), it's important to understand that existing known reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal in North America alone, are enough to meet our needs for centuries. That's why it's so important for the enemies of liberty to restrict or eliminate prospecting, extraction, and refining energy here, employing evil and inhumane rationalizations that rest on an assumption that animals, plants, and even naked dirt and rocks are more important than their fellow human beings.

Whom they plan to kill off anyway, in the long run. These are the moral cripples famous for saying that "What the world needs is a good plague".

Environmentalists, far from being friends of the Earth, are the enemies of humanity. They want you impoverished, enslaved, or dead. Nobody who actually cares about his fellow human beings­or for the future of his children­should ever feed them, house them, clothe them, transport them, protect them, or support them in any other manner.

Let the bastards freeze in the dark.

But I digress.

Just because there is still plenty of fuel -- energy -- left in the ground, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't look for more. The more of anything there is, the cheaper it gets. The cheaper it gets the more we can afford to use. The more we can afford to use, the faster our progress out of the War Century, the century of the biggest, most powerful, and most destructive governments in human history.

And upward, to the stars.

One of the most startling -- and gratifying -- discoveries in recent decades is that most petroleum is not derived from dead animals or plants, but was created by non-biological, or "abiotic" processes in the Earth's crust. These processes continue to this day, and, according to some expers, oil fields once thought to be depleted are presently fillng up again, from underneath, with geologically newer oil.

There are those who say that anywhere you drill -- provided you drill deeply enough -- you'll strike oil. (Naturally, a shallow hole is cheaper to drill than a deeper hole, so some minimal forethought and exploration are called for.) The claim is controversial, and especially repugnant to those who have invested their lives and fortunes in conventional theories about the origin of oil, but the Russians, acting on it, went from being one of the world's largest importers of petroleum to one of the largest exporters, in only half a century.

Oil, in fact, is the second most abundant liquid on the planet, and, in a free market, should cost a mere fraction of what it does now.

There is a number of alternative cheap, clean energy sources to oil, gas, and coal, and I am not referring to diffuse and marginal technologies like solar power and windmills. These perennial favorites of the environmentalist movement have extremely limited small scale applications, such as lighting road signs far from civilization, or pumping well water into stock tanks (windmill-provided power to cities is very costly compared to conventional sources) and otherwise represent expensive and completely unneccesary diversions. The same goes for what I would term "fuel substitutes", such as hydrogen and ethanol.

What might be termed "conventional nuclear power"­atomic fission­is unsatisfactory only because it requires a government or large corporation to underwrite, build, and operate it. Otherwise, it is the cleanest, safest, most reliable source of energy on the planet and most of the complaints about it are hysterical or politically contrived.

A generation ago, it was common among the anti-nuclear activists to claim that fission is so unsafe that insurance can't be found to cover it. This is a lie. Insurance companies simply couldn't compete with the protection afforded by government under the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act which limits a company's liability to an unrealistic and unjust figure in the case of a nuclear accident. We now see this same legal "philosophy" set aside by executive command in the case of the Obama-BP oil spill, and this may end offshore drilling entirely.

Although dozens of nuclear reactors provide some 19 percent of the electricity consumed in America (significantly higher than the world average, although 80 percent of France's electricity comes from nuclear power), that figure is in decline, and there have been no new reactors built for many years. The United States Navy maintains over a hundred reactors on its vessels with what is reported to be perfect safety, even on those rare occasions when ships have succumbed to some other disaster and been destroyed. The decline of the United States as a culture can almost be dated to its abandonment of nuclear power, not so much because nuclear power is a good thing, but because it betrays a psychological and emotional loss of the country's grip on the future.

More than anything, the future of nuclear power was killed off by federal construction regulations that seemed to be changed arbitrarily every day, slowing the building process to a crawl, greatly increasing its cost, forcing constant redesigns that might be reversed the next day.

Equally to blame were hundreds of frivolous nuisance lawsuits on the part of the anti-nuclear movement which genuine tort reform of the "loser pays" kind may have prevented. Interestingly, the anti-nuclear movement began with no actual concern about nuclear power itself; its founders, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden among others, found themselves missing the "good old days" of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and began casting around cynically for something new that they could protest.

In the history of nuclear power, there have been two "accidents", one at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1979, and one at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine (then a part of the Soviet Union) in 1986.

In the case of Three Mile Island, when a malfunction occurred, the emergency shut-down system worked exactly as it was supposed to, and the danger was grossly exaggerated by anti-nuclear activists and their propagandists in the news media. Edward Teller, the so-called "father of the H-bomb", visited the site and said afterward that he was the only casualty at Three Mile island, having suffered a minor heart attack in the parking lot, which he blamed on Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader.

Chernobyl is another kettle of fish altogether. Like all communist technology, it was built on the cheap, the product of shoddy, possibly drunken workmanship, substandard materials, corrupt management, and questionable design. Its emergency containment system failed to meet world standards, and it was said, half-jokingly, by western engineers that the Soviets saved money on their reactors by not building an adequate containment vessel around the reactor until it was actually needed.

If anything, Chernobyl demonstrates the serious risks of allowing too much government control of, and interference with, any industry. The danger is only increased in the case of something like nuclear power.

The only legitimate technical objection to nuclear power is that it produces radioactive waste -- spent fuel -- that must be disposed of somehow, usually by storing it deep in abandoned mines where it will remain radioactive and dangerous for thousands of years. The answer to this problem is "rebreeding", a process by which this spent fuel is made useful once again by exposing it to radiation within a special reactor.

France routinely reprocesses a significant amount of its nuclear fuel, and is said to enjoy the cleanest air in Europe. Unfortunately, America has no more breeder reactors, having shut them all down years ago, supposedly, for fear that the end product, the nuclear fuel plutonium, could also be used to build atomic weapons. This is incredibly irrational and stupid, exactly like giving up the use of dynamite in road construction because it might be used for criminal purposes.

At least two technologies, currently suppressed, could each supply enough power to civilization, on their own, to run civilization for centuries. One of these sources is catalytic or "cold" fusion which, contrary to popular belief was never discredited after its discovery in Utah by Fleischmann and Pons, but is still being researched and developed enthusiastically in Europe by certain governments and corporations.

What seems like a dream to some -- a footlocker-sized fusion reactor in everybody's basement, or under the hoods of their cars, that would supply all their energy needs with mininal attention and no nuclear waste or chemical exhaust -- is a nightmare to others, chiefly those who generate energy now by burning coal or natural gas, or who string the wires across the countryside from powerplants to your house.

Regrettably, there isn't a single industrial ox in today's society that isn't gored by what they perceive as the threat of cheap, clean fusion. It is said that its discoverers fled America to Europe, and for a time, actually disappeared, out of fear that they would be killed. All governments hate and fear the individual -- and corporate mercantilism isn't very far behind them -- and wish to restrain him, because they're afraid that, unrestrained, he'll act just like they do.

Thermal depolymerization is a late-comer to the field of energy, but one that shows great promise and is already a proven technology. In this process, any organic garbage can be "cooked" into what amounts to "light, sweet crude", the most desirable variety of petroleum. Cast-off computer cabinets were mentioned in the first article about it, as a raw material source. Old automobile tires -- of which there are huge mountains in America, some of them slowly smoldering -- can be processed to produce oil, plus carbon black, a useful industrial product.

Environmentalists whine constantly about landfills. The process of thermal depolymerization will transform them into energy mines. The best part is that, having been demonstrated to work in a small proof of concept plant in New Jersey, the process's inventors believe they can produce oil for somewhere between fifteen and eight dollars a barrel, in a world market where conventional oil is several times that figure, and it doesn't have to be shipped here by pipeline or tanker. Nor does it have to be drilled for on land or at the bottom of the sea. It can even be produced locally, as a routine part of municipal sanitation.

What it means, at the pump, is one dollar gas. "One Dollar Gas"-- that's a winning campaign slogan, for any political party intelligent enough to pick it up and run with it. Regrettably, when I offered it -- and more than once -- to the Libertarian Party, they declined to do so.

Unfortunately, those who provide our energy now, using outdated technology, at much higher prices, feel threatened by this invention -- as well they should -- and are doing their level best to suppress it. It is up to the new media -- the Internet and talk radio -- to expose this illicit activity, bring it to a halt, and promote the new technology.

When I was young -- surprisingly so, perhaps as young as eleven or twelve -- I realized more or less suddenly that the solutions to all of the world's problems had almost certainly been discovered already, quite possibly many times over, but that nobody else wanted to hear or think about them. If libertarians have a natural destiny, it is to think the unthinkable, speak the unspeakable, and get the world to listen.

In general, if we are to survive and advance, the energy industry must be detaxed and deregulated soon. Costs will plummet, and there will be no more reason to rely on unfriendly strangers for our wellbeing.

http://www.down-with-power.com/energy.html