Gentlemen,
I'll not allow Kestas to take the flak all on his own body armor, so to speak. There is a relevant article today in navy times, which anybody interested in reading can find here, if they scroll down:
http://www.military.com/earlybrief
Headline is Pentagon seminars seek solutions to "oil addiction"
One speaker was former CIA Chief James Woolsey. Some remarks of his included:
“We must focus on short, quick moves that will give us alternatives, but they are not silver bullets,” Woolsey said.
He described a plan that could eventually get gas mileage of about 1,000 miles a gallon: Take hybrid gas-electric cars like the Toyota Prius and add a feature that will allow owners to plug their car into the electric grid overnight to top off the battery. By running the car off the battery for the first 20 miles of a day’s commute, the mileage per gallon of gasoline would rise from the average 45 miles the Prius offers today to about 135 miles a gallon.
In the plan’s second stage, he said, replace the standard gasoline engine in the Prius with one that can run on a combination of regular gas and cellulose-based ethanol made from switch grasses: The mileage per gallon of gasoline would reach about 500 miles.
Auto makers also could replace today’s steel and aluminum car bodies with carbon composites already used in Formula 1 race cars, making automobiles extremely lightweight yet crash-resistant, and boost the mileage to about 1,000 miles per gallon of gas.
“None of this requires brand new research,” Woolsey said. “All you need is improvements, no Manhattan Projects, no white [lab] coats needed.”
The major elements of his plan already are being tried out in different parts of the country, and with the right combination of short-duration subsidies, the United States could move toward oil independence, he said.
For example, Brazil, which began a switch to ethanol-based cars 30 years ago, now relies on oil for only 60 percent of its transportation needs, Woolsey said, and in another 10 years will be oil-independent.
In case people wondered how these ideas related to national security, Woolsey, who served as an undersecretary of the Navy before becoming CIA director from 1993-95, offered this: Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of oil, makes about $160 billion in annual profits.
“A good chunk of that, and about $3 billion to $4 billion from the Saudi government and $1 billion from private citizens, goes to the Wahhabis, who build madrasas in Pakistan, which teach its students to hate a lot of people,” he said. “If you wonder who’s paying for this, you are, each time you fill the tank.”
Wahhabism is an austere form of Islam that prescribes a literal interpretation of the Koran and regards those who don’t practice such forms of Islam as heathens and enemies.
Woolsey said U.S. consumption of oil that goes toward paying for fringe Islamic groups is “like paying for both sides in a war. This is not a good plan.”
For those who say these adjustments are difficult, “we have done hard things before,” Woolsey said. “In the past, we have dismantled kaiser’s and Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, the Japanese imperial forces and the Soviet Union. All of them decided to take us on — they are all gone and we’re still here.”
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I guess it is your choice to drive whatever you can get your hands on. ****, you can go buy 20 gallons of gas and just give it away on a street corner, if you want to be charitable and just get a kick out of buying gas. A good chunk of change, however, makes it back to the pockets of some people with an avowed goal of blowing you up to kingdom come.
Just something to think about the next time you are at the pump watching your own wallet get thinner. There ARE consequences (national trade deficit anybody?), both economic and strategic, to what we are doing.
Blame it on "these dad-gum atheistic lib'rals" if it makes you feel better. The money isn't going to the coffers of the ACLU, though. But I'm sure Al-Qaeda gets a cut out of it.
Regards,
Jett Rink