Fuck Green, Go Red

Why red, you say? Simple. It’s diametrically opposed to green on the color wheel. It is also the color of blood, which I am growing ever closer to spilling. I have been getting increasingly annoyed with advertisements chanting “Go Green” like some kind of deranged meditation aid. It is automatically assumed that I should go green because every douchebag hippie this side of Al Gore has suddenly managed to get a job in an ad agency and is trying to push environmentalism down my throat. My final straw tonight was when one of my credit card companies, trying to pretend they give a damn about the planet, humanity, or anything other than generating user fees and interest payments, informed me that if I would go green by opting for electronic statements I could win some underpowered bastard offspring of a weedwhacker and a rechargeable power tool masquerading as an automobile.

Well, if ConglomCoBank of Delaware thinks I need to receive less paper to save the planet, maybe they need to quit sending me special offers, balance transfer checks, and additional offers of prescreened credit. A simple step on their part would cut out about half the junk mail I receive on a weekly basis. Instead, they would like me to quit receiving the paper trail that lets me know if they’ve managed to fuck my account up. In return, I might win a hybrid automobile that would be much less useful to me than my current full-sized pickup truck and which I’d have to pay taxes on. I guess since I already subsidize their piss-poor behavior by using their products, asking me to continue to do so by making further ridiculous demands seems only natural from their standpoint. Pointing out that they, with no help on my part, could save a few boxes of paper a year by voluntarily cutting down on their direct mail marketing probably makes me some kind of ingrate.

How about all these fucking people quit trying to tell me to go green because all the little environmentalists imagined themselves a secular religion that equates pollution with sin? Come up with a reason for me to care beyond the endlessly inaccurate doommongering the hippies and their retarded greenie offspring have been spewing my entire life. Want me to go green? Explain to me how it’s going to make my life better today. I don’t care about preventing some hypothetical disaster in 50 years. I don’t care about how it’s going to make Ngomo, Urdlich, and Chang have a better life in which ever portion of the third world they inhabit. I don’t care that somebody’s grandkids will be able to drink the pure water flowing through the Houston Ship Channel. I want to know what it’s going to do for me, right fucking now. Until you can do that, have a nice cup of STFU.

Extortion Isn’t Extortion When Congress Does It

So, the heads of 5 major oil companies got to were forced to go up to Capital Hill yesterday and explain how economics works to a bunch of clueless gits headed up by Rep. Edward Markey (D-mAsshole). I’m going to go off on a slight tangent for a moment and discuss something that irks the living pee out of me, to wit:

to keep billions in federal tax subsidies

There is no such thing as a “tax subsidy”. It’s a weasel phrase designed by socialists to make it appear that any reduction in your taxes is a subsidy from the government. I can’t think of a more pernicious lie at the moment, since it propagates the idea the government is really entitled to all your money, and anything they let you keep is “subsidizing” you. Fuck that. A subsidy is when the government strokes you a check. When you don’t pay as much in taxes as some unspeakably moronic jackanapes thinks you should, it is simply a tax reduction. Are we all clear on this? Good.

Now, let’s move on to some substantive points. If the government wants to reduce the price of gasoline at the pump, it can do so unilaterally in every state in the land simply by lowering gasoline taxes. Somehow, the government’s complicity in keeping gasoline prices up doesn’t occur to people like Rep. Markey. It’s all a plot by evil oil companies, even when ExxonMobil’s VP points out they’ve paid more in US taxes over the past five years then they’ve made in profit. XOM has an effective tax rate of 44%, and somehow, that’s just not enough. We'll take more with a windfall profits tax, because that'll make gas cheaper! Wait, what? Imposing additional costs makes things cheaper? WTF?

I guess the question to ask is who benefits from all this money the oil industry makes? Obviously, your federal government does pretty well from it. Most state government have a pretty large finger in the pie, and Texas is no exception. In the end, however, the profits are supposed to go to shareholders. The largest 10 shareholders of ExxonMobil:

Barclays Global Investors UK Holdings Ltd
State Street Corporation
Vanguard Group, Inc.
FMR LLC
Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
AXA
Bank of America Corporation
JP Morgan Chase & Company
Northern Trust Corporation
Wellington Management Company, LLP

If you’ll notice, most of the top 10 are asset management firms, banks, and mutual fund companies. I know for a fact at least three of the mutual funds in our 401k accounts have XOM as a holding. When they make money, I make money. I’m willing to bet most people with balanced 401k plans have some oil and gas industry stocks. But that’s cool, let Congress sock it to the oil companies because it won’t affect anyone but those greedy bastards in oil, right? If you wanted to retire soon and your 401k takes a beating because energy stocks tank, well, too bad for you, dammit. Work a few more years. Congress had to show those companies they should invest in worthless non-commercial technologies instead of giving dividends.

I’ve never made any secret of the fact my entire post-military career has been in the oil industry. Part of what irritates the hell out of me is the beating we take from fucktards on the left and in Congress. When the industry is booming, ignuts start whining about excessive profits and throwing around terms like windfall profits tax. Yet when the industry tanks, like it did in ’99, nobody could give a shit. Dumbasses who loaned money to people who filled out loan applications in crayon and had negative total assets are going to get bailed out by the Fed. Farmers get subsidies, actual checks, year after year because they’re special. The oil industry makes the modern world function. You may disagree from a philosophical standpoint about whether that’s good, but the fact is inarguable. We are essential to everything anybody does, yet the oil industry goes through one of our periodic busts and crickets chirp. If you’re not going to help us during the bust, don’t screw with us during the boom. We’ll manage just fine.

In the meantime, Rep. Markey and the rest of the ignuts in Congress need to focus on what they can do to lower gas prices instead of browbeating actual productive companies. Aren't there some baseball players they can harass or something?

Hindenburg Redux

So the kind folks at Hit and Run have posted a link to yet another article about hydrogen. The author, unsurprisingly, agrees with me, which means he must be brilliant and learned. Or completely insane. Anyhow, as I’ve been saying for a while, he says hydrogen is not the solution. Key quote:

The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.

Ding! We have a winner. The article goes into painful detail about the what and the why, with lots of math. His proposed solution strikes me as flawed, but his takedown of hydrogen is masterful.

Just remember, folks, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a bitch. Any scheme which depends on repeatedly changing energy from one form to another is bound to fail because of conversion losses.

Hydrogen Blues

Gee, here's an article pointing out what most of us in the energy industry have known for some time. Hydrogen isn't the answer, unless the question is how to drive a car when there's no gasoline anymore. If that's not the question, there's better solutions out there already.

Hydrogen is appealing, although I can't for the life of me figure out why. Can somebody clue me in on this?