Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

What about companies who artificially create their demand? For example, those who engage in non-competitive practices, or who use their money to bribe politicians in Washington to make them the only game in town (such as the lovely Halliburton)? Are they relying on the 'free market?' There is no such thing as a 'free market.' The very term posits a level playing field that simply does not exist.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

What about companies who artificially create their demand? For example, those who engage in non-competitive practices, or who use their money to bribe politicians in Washington to make them the only game in town (such as the lovely Halliburton)? Are they relying on the 'free market?' There is no such thing as a 'free market.' The very term posits a level playing field that simply does not exist.

Cycloptichorn

There are anti-trust laws that supposedly address what you are talking about, and laws that govern price fixing.

Nobody is stopping anyone from competing with Halliburton, cyclops. If it is so lucrative of a business, how come they don't have the competition you think they lack? And by the way, they do have competiton in many of the areas of business that they conduct. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

okie wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

What about companies who artificially create their demand? For example, those who engage in non-competitive practices, or who use their money to bribe politicians in Washington to make them the only game in town (such as the lovely Halliburton)? Are they relying on the 'free market?' There is no such thing as a 'free market.' The very term posits a level playing field that simply does not exist.

Cycloptichorn

There are anti-trust laws that supposedly address what you are talking about, and laws that govern price fixing.

Nobody is stopping anyone from competing with Halliburton, cyclops. If it is so lucrative of a business, how come they don't have the competition you think they lack? And by the way, they do have competiton in many of the areas of business that they conduct. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Um, do the words 'no-bid contract' mean anything to you? Someone IS denying them competition, and I think it's pretty easy to figure out that it is the people who used to run the company and now sit in the Executive branch.

Cycloptichorn

On the subject of ice, this story that Arctic ice may all melt this summer.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,372542,00.html

Two observations, one being that Rush said today his climatological source says there is more Arctic ice now than there was last year, so the likelihood that the ice will melt is very low, considering it didn't last year, and my second observation which I have not heard anyone wonder about, if the ice is all disappearing, where are the catastrophic sea level rises that we have been hearing about for years, from Al Gore and all the other doomsdayers? How come we aren't already seeing catastrophic flooding along low lying ocean front areas everywhere around the world?

okie,

A little bit of science for you. The arctic ice floats so when it melts the sea doesn't rise. It is the melting of ice on Greenland and Antarctica that will cause the sea level rise.

Yes, the colder winter created more ice in the Arctic this year but scientists were surprised by how fast it is melting. If Rush is your science source then no wonder you are so uninformed.

I had the impression the doomsdayers included Arctic Ice melting as part of the reason, Parados. It seems to me we should start seeing something more than the very tiny effects if any of the predictions were to be taken seriously.

parados wrote:

okie,

A little bit of science for you. The arctic ice floats so when it melts the sea doesn't rise. It is the melting of ice on Greenland and Antarctica that will cause the sea level rise.

Yes, the colder winter created more ice in the Arctic this year but scientists were surprised by how fast it is melting. If Rush is your science source then no wonder you are so uninformed.

I had the impression the doomsdayers included Arctic Ice melting as part of the reason, Parados. It seems to me we should start seeing something more than the very tiny effects if any of the predictions were to be taken seriously.

Rush communicates with professional people that he trusts, so it isn't altogether what he has concluded on the subject.

By the way, one article said it may have been ice free 20,000 years ago. What caused it then, Prehistoric man's campfires?

Rebuttal to the article re melting Arctic ice posted by Cyclop. The ice is melting yes as it always has from time to time, but the 'doom and gloom' forcast is a number years away as is usually the case with global warming doom and gloom forecasts. The article I have linked also suggests a realistic positive side to melting Arctic ice:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7461707.stm

Airlines slow down flights to save on fuel

JetBlue adds 2 minutes to each flight, saves $13.6 million a year in jet fuel

Slow Down a Little, Save a Lot of Gas

by Peter Valdes-Dapena
Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Speeding on the highway adds a surprising amount to your fuel costs.

With gas prices rising, gas-saving advice abounds: Drive more gently, don't carry extra stuff in your trunk, combine your shopping trips.

This is all sound advice but there's one driving tip that will probably save you more gas than all the others, especially if you spend a lot of time on the highway: Slow down.

In a typical family sedan, every 10 miles per hour you drive over 60 is like the price of gasoline going up about 54 cents a gallon. That figure will be even higher for less fuel-efficient vehicles that go fewer miles on a gallon to start with.

The reason is as clear as the air around you.

When cruising on the highway, your car will be in its highest gear with the engine humming along at relatively low rpm's. All your car needs to do is maintain its speed by overcoming the combined friction of its own moving parts, the tires on the road surface and, most of all, the air flowing around, over and under it.

Pushing air around actually takes up about 40% of a car's energy at highway speeds, according to Roger Clark, a fuel economy engineer for General Motors.

Traveling faster makes the job even harder. More air builds up in front of the vehicle, and the low pressure "hole" trailing behind gets bigger, too. Together, these create an increasing suction that tends to pull back harder and harder the faster you drive. The increase is actually exponential, meaning wind resistance rises much more steeply between 70 and 80 mph than it does between 50 and 60.

Every 10 mph faster reduces fuel economy by about 4 mpg, a figure that remains fairly constant regardless of vehicle size, Clark said. (It might seem that a larger vehicle, with more aerodynamic drag, would see more of an impact. But larger vehicles also tend to have larger, more powerful engines that can more easily cope with the added load.)

That's where that 54 cents a gallon estimate comes from. If a car gets 28 mpg at 65 mph, driving it at 75 would drop that to 24 mpg. Fuel costs over 100 miles, for example - estimated at $3.25 a gallon - would increase by $1.93, or the cost of an additional 0.6 gallons of gas. That would be like paying 54 cents a gallon more for each of the 3.6 gallons used at 65 mph. That per-gallon price difference remains constant over any distance.

Engineers at Consumer Reports magazine tested this theory by driving a Toyota Camry sedan and a Mercury Mountaineer SUV at various set cruising speeds on a stretch of flat highway. Driving the Camry at 75 mph instead of 65 dropped fuel economy from 35 mpg to 30. For the Mountaineer, fuel economy dropped from 21 to 18.

Over the course of a 400-mile road trip, the Camry driver would spend about $6.19 more on gas at the higher speed and Mountaineer driver would spend an extra $10.32.

Driving even slower, say 55 mph, could save slightly more gas. In fact, the old national 55 mph speed limit, instituted in 1974, was a response to the period's energy crisis.

The primary causes of the inflated price of oil are:
1. The declining value of the dollar;
2. The rising international demand for oil;
3. The US ten-year old federal prohibitions against domestic oil drilling;
4. The US ten-year failure to develop an adequate substituite for oil.

Foxfyre wrote:

Rebuttal to the article re melting Arctic ice posted by Cyclop. The ice is melting yes as it always has from time to time, but the 'doom and gloom' forcast is a number years away as is usually the case with global warming doom and gloom forecasts. The article I have linked also suggests a realistic positive side to melting Arctic ice:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7461707.stm

Are you kidding me? A realistic positive side to major environmental changes? The impact on our society will be tremendous if these things happen, Fox, and the fact that shipping lanes will be opened up isn't worth much when our traditional food growing areas are hard hit.

It's sort of like claiming that, in a coal mine, when the canary is dying, it's a good thing; look at all that room the cage took up and how often we had to feed the damn thing.... the height of idiocy to not think there will be any side effects to this.

Whether it is man-made or not, it's still going to be a serious problem for our entire species. You would be smart to acknowledge this.

Cycloptichorn

3. The US ten-year old federal prohibitions against domestic oil drilling;

ican711nm wrote:

3. The US ten-year old federal prohibitions against domestic oil drilling;

The US prohibited drilling anywhere in the US?

I call Bull ****.

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