Too Much To Dream

SUV's fund terrorists? Give me break. If our foreign oil consumption really does, in fact, fund terrorism around the world, then it's completely ironic that America's number one use for oil is to keep our military mobile. And of course, they're out there whacking those oil-funded terrorists. That must be that Big Circle of Life I keep hearing about. Here's the honest truth: Even if you sell your car and ride a bicycle, there's still a tremendous amount of oil being used on your behalf, from the military to the local government to the trucks that deliver your groceries to the local store for you to buy. It makes more sense (and sounds like more fun) to go right head and buy that big honkin' gas guzzler and use up all the oil as fast as possible. Think Cadillac Eldorado here. Now get out there and cruise for peace!

i guess i still believe a little bit makes a difference. it's one of the big reasons we chose a Civic. it's not like i can do anything about military consumption. but i can do something about mine.

it'll be a Prius in a few years, unless they come up with something better, perhaps methanol-powered.

still, Arianna Huffington? ummm....

Michele does a great job of ripping her a new one.

I love SUVs. I want one. If I didn't have a ridiculous commute (and if I made more money!), I would have gotten one when I was car shopping. I will have one some day. A big gas guzzler that I don't need and just like the way it looks. Because I'm that environmentally concientous.

Arianna can kiss my ass...

Of course driving an SUV supports terrorism via an exaggerated need for gas. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't make it a lie.

How can we say on one hand that the Saudis support terror, and then on the other hand say that buying gas from them doesn't keep money flowing to groups like Hamas and to "Palestinian" suicide bombers? It makes no sense.

The problem is that we support terror, all of us, every day, and not just when we get into our cars. Plastics are a monster source of oil usage. Every time we say, "Plastic not paper, please." we support terror. Every time we by lotion, or milk, or . . . you get the picture.

The question is not whether or not SUV and plastic bags are responsible for the U.S. keeping the Saudis paying off suicide bombers and incouraging Wahabism. They do. The question is how much personal discomfort is each of use willing to endure to at least decrease the flow of U.S. dollars to the house of Saud and those they support. I suspect that most of us aren't willing to give up even a single gallon of gas, which is at least indicated by the tantrums being thrown by the pro-SUV crowd.

While I understand the desire to tweak Huffington's nose (which has richly deserved tweaking for the last decade, at least), I sort of have to go with Tom on this one.

Though her commercials aren't any less ridiculous than the ones they are satirizing.

Consider, that she married into a Texan oil family,which made its money, extracting oil
from Indonesia's Suharto regime, which has
approx 500,000 murdered just in 1965-66; and
an equivalent amount in East Timor. Of course
this is the same type of person, who almost
singlehanded exacts a higher demand for drugs
with her own tirades.

The problem with Arianna’s campaign is that:

1. It copies a campaign (drugs=terrorism) that is also ineffective. Prohibition & nagging just don't work.

2.Mentioning ‘conservation’ brings back traumatic memories of the [shudder] Carter years.

3.Most people would rather see the Saudis punished for their actions. They don’t want to punish themselves by imposing stratospheric taxes on fuel and giving up plastics (tactics that wouldn’t do much to help the economy, either)

4.Weathy Arianna says "do as I say, not as I do."

There are hybrid SUV’s out there already. If they were as powerful and as roomy as a regular SUV, and they didn’t cost too much, then people would want to buy them. If Ariana were really interested in fuel efficiency, she would be spending her money on researching fuel efficient technologies that will benefit us & the economy.

Have you ever noticed how you never see Arianna and Zsa Zsa on screen at the same time?

I hate SUVs as much as anyone, but that's only because of the impossibility of seeing around the damned things. I continue to be astonished at the number of otherwise sensible people who actually believe that plunging the Middle East into a catastrophic depression by ceasing to buy its only significant export would make the region more stable, or its inhabitants more fond of us.

Tom is probably right.

But 2 things to consider, that I heard from someone who has given this more thought than I:

We also buy lots of oil from South American countries (which probably supports drug use, incidentally). As it is more expensive than what we buy from the Middle East - if people use less gas, which country do you think we'll buy less from first?

Gas for automobiles makes up less than half the amount of oil we use in total. Isn't it a just a teeny bit optimistic to hope that cutting back on that portion will make a huge difference, when we don't even consider doing anything about the rest?

And if I ever bought an extremely fuel efficient vehicle - i.e., a hybird - it would be for the sole purpose of saving myself money.

A funny thing happens when you give an American a fuel-efficient car: They drive further. Matter of fact, the tend to drive far enough to spend the same amount on gas as they did with their old gas guzzler. ("Hey, I'm getting 40 mpg- Let's go to the beach!") So much for conservation. The more
I read about oil, and the problems it has caused, the more I look forward to its decline in a few years.

Gas guzzlers make us buy more oil from the Arabs? All the more reason to occupy their countries, take it away from them, and put them back in the tents their conduct has earned them.

It's official: Arianna has lost the last trace of her sanity.

Saudi Arabia supplies less than 12% of the oil we use. According to this article, they aren't as essential as they seem to be.

Absolutely right, Mary. We import most of the foreign oil we use from Venezuela and Canada. (Ok, just Canada these days.) So by the time you subtract all the military and non-private transportation uses from that 12%, we get about zip from the Saudis when it comes to gas coming out of the pump down at the local filling station. So why are we still treating them like our favorite drunk uncle? I have no idea. I wish someone could explain it to me. Meanwhile, I take comfort in know that when their oil runs out- and it will- they'll go back to being nothing more that the world's biggest kitty litter box. So if you drive a fuel efficient car, maybe you're just prolonging the agony? Maybe we should work harder at using it all up and be done with them.

Thanks to Tom, above, for helping me put my finger on what bothers me about these harangues.

If I buy something from a guy, and that guy uses the money I give him to, say, buy drugs, I am not ethically responsible for his actions. If my society thinks drugs are bad, then the solution is to put the guy's ass in jail, not sit around making pious statements about "enabling".

I've begun to dislike SUVs for the reason Paul Zrimsek gives. The other day I was in a crowded parking garage obviously meant for lesser vehicles, and some of the SUV drivers had a hard time negotiating the turns. I'll grumble about SUVs, but I'll do it in the same way I grumble about rustbuckets, hippie bumper stickers, and arrogant Lexus drivers.

(When the day comes that I take over the world and impose my standards, SUVs will be the least of your worries, I can tell you that.)

If I knew it was going to piss THAT bitch off, I'd have purchased a Sante Fe instead of an Accent.

Calling Dr. Bighands. We have a cranial rectal impaction in Hollywood! Calling Dr. Bighands!

I would just like to point out that not all SUV are 'gas-guzzlers.' In fact, most of the new ones are far more fuel efficient and have less dangerous emissions than cars of twenty years ago.

Then I guess I'll have to buy the '73 Ford...

Give a hoot! Pollute!

Eichra,

It's more than that. Like Trent Lott, Arianna Huffington is an anatomical wonder: she put her foot in her mouth while she had head up her ass.

Does anyone here know what it would cost if we supplied all our own oil? I know there have been plenty of times in the past when selling U.S. oil became profitable because of higher foreign prices, and we never saw any of the "five dollars a gallon" crap the liberals keep squeaking about.

Funny, usually, liberals whine that we'd be better off if gas DID cost five dollars a gallon. But I guess the goal is to harm President Bush, not to help the country, and that determines what the truth is on a given day.

It's not a matter of cost- it's a matter of can't. Our domestic lower-48 oil production peaked in 1970. Alaskan oil production peaked in 1988. We just don't have any, at any price. Cruise through web sites like www.hubbertpeak.com and www.dieoff.org and fear the future.

The future doesn't look so bad.

Isn't current oil-production capacity more a matter of how hard we're trying than of what's in the ground? Wouldn't we be pumping a hell of a lot more oil here if we had to?

Hey, I just happen to have an 8-mile-to-the-gallon 1973 Ford for sale! It's a Ford F250 4×4 in lovely shades of green and rust. And you only need a short stepladder to get into it.

I'm selling it to help pay for my wife's new SUV.

Incidentally, it's unlikely that we will ever 'run out of oil.' There is a great deal of oil in the ground, as well as oil shale, that is simply not economically recoverable at present. As the price of oil goes up, more of this 'more expensive to produce' oil will be produced, but eventually the cost of oil will exceed that of the alternative energy sources and we will come to rely more on the alternatives. At some point, the value of oil in manufacturing plastics and such will make it uneconomical to burn it for fuel. The invisible hand will out, a fact not lost on my brethern and sistern in the oil bidness who are investing heavily in solar and wind technology as we speak.

I'm still in favor of stopping all domestic production of oil. Let's use up all the cheap oil the arabs have, first.
Then, when their oil is gone they will have to come begging to us for gas to keep their limos running!

I'm sure the 8 MPG 1973 Ford would be perfectly acceptable. The mileage doesn't matter, as long as it's not an evil SUV

What people don't understand is that complete oil independence is impossible. Even if you could eliminate it's use as a fuel (which you couldn't, at least not with the level of technology our civilization currently posesses) the US still just couldn't quit importing it. There are a whole plethora of materials made from petroleum products. The first two things that come to mind is asphalt and anything made of plastic. All plastics (for that matter, most synthetic materials) are made from petroleum products. My idea for energy includes a lot of nuclear power (and fusion power once we can actually control it) and running your cars off atomic batteries (a device with low grade uranium in it with collectors that collect the radiation and produce electricity. And yes, I know it sounds dangerous, but I don't think containment would be a problem, even in a crash. If we can make a voice recorder for an airplane that can survive a 600 mph impact with the ground, we can make a box for some damned uranium or radium) and using nuclear power exclusively for ships/locomotives. Not really sure what you could do with aircraft yet. Hydrogen won't work, it doesn't have enough potential energy and even the smallest nuclear reactor is way to big and heavy.

And might I suggest a gas-inefficient vehichle: a 1970 4-wheel drive Chevrolet K5 Blazer.

Go ahead, set a Santa Fe. You'll end up getting pissed off at yourself in about 6 months. A lot of people have told me how cool my Highlander looks. You'd be much happier with a 2003 model.

Rinardman- You are an ABSOLUTE Genius!!! That's the best answer I've ever heard! Meanwhile, for those of you that are waiting for technology and the open market economy to save the day: The "dollar price" of oil isn't the issue. You have to look at the "energy price"- How much energy it takes to deliver the oil to the consumer. Right now, it's at about four to one: One barrel of oil is used for every four brought to market. When that price hits one-to-one, the pumps stop, no matter what the price. That's why hydrogen fuel cells won't work without serious governmenmt subsidies, as it takes more energy to refine the hydrogen than what you end up with in the resulting hydrogen. That's also why heavy oils, shale oil and tar sands won't happen- it will take more energy to get the oil out of those rocks than what you end up with. But that's ok. After what will probably be a rather rocky transition period, the low-oil future should be a bit more pleasant- rather like Willoughby.

There goes my plan for a hydrogen-producing plant that's powered by burning hydrogen!

More bad news: it takes more than a kilowatt-hour's worth of energy to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Just goes to show the uselessness of converting energy from one form to another, I guess.

Another layer of idiocy inherent in Arianna's ad is the logical inconsistency. OK, let's postulate for a moment that if you drive an SUV, you're funding terrorism. What happens if you just drive a regular car? Yep, funding terrorism. How about if you just bike? Funding terrorism. You use power generated by burning oil (not me, BTW: Florida Power! NUKULER!). You shop at stores who use power generated by burning oil, and you buy goods that were shipped by trucks or trains that burn oil. You wear synthetic fabrics that were manufactured from petroleum. Your bike tires are synthetic rubber that, you guessed it, were made from oil. Your mail is flown on an airplane or shipped on a truck that...ok, the horse is dead now. It'd be much easier to track down and kill every potential terrorist on the planet than change our economy so that we don't use any terrorist-capitalizing oil.

Actually, I'd encourage this type of ad if it meant we got to build more nuclear power plants. But the Left frequently offers problems and rarely solutions.

Want an even deeper layer of idiocy? If we went to electric cars, how do you charge them up? You hook them up to an electrically outlet that is powered a big bad coal fired power plant.

It must be a bitch to be a greenie.

Or worse -- a nuclear-powered plant! Why, why can't it all be done by nice, clean elf-magic?

Why, oh why can't we get the sun to put out about ten times more energy so solar would be practical? Aside from the fact that we'd all be quick-fried to a crackly crunch, I mean?

Volkswagon Euro Van.... That's the ticket. Got to bring the rock to the people.

The phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" applies here. We are constantly surrounded by automobiles and pointing the finger to SUV's enables everyone to identify with the gas consumption debate and form an opinion. The invisible consumptions includes: Factories, tire/rubber manufacturing, mineral mining & refining industries, Airplanes, Delivery trucks and many other such areas.
If someone is going to make an opinion, do your research and look at the whole picture and don't let yourself get played like a puppet by the media!