Flashfire does the math

Briefly, I wanted to point out a post wherein flashfire does the math regarding this State of the Union statement:

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

Assuming President Bush chose his words specifically and carefully, as is always true for State of the Union addresses, that's actually an extremely small number for 20 years of work—around 1.6Mbpd—and not nearly enough to meet the challenges ahead. He said "more than," so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say 1.8Mbpd. An impressive-sounding statement at first glimpse – but Nixon, as it were, did not go to China after all.

I caught some of the State of the Union last night, but was in the car and distracted for most of it. I may have more comments later; it's on the TiVo.

Everybody else is...

STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT
a few things said about what got said

In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting -- yet it ends in danger and decline.
The placement of this element makes me think that there's more urge to protectionism going on than I'm aware of to date. Perhaps he wants to pre-empt it as a 2006 issue. I don't know.

Second, we're continuing reconstruction efforts [in Iraq]
And cutting off funding at the end of the current cycle. I've talked about this being worrisome before. I'm annoyed that he's pretending that's not going on.

Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy.
"Don't talk about how we botched the occupation." Personally, I'm pro-responsibility. Call me foolish, call me irresponsible, scribble on my birth certificate and rename me Snaarki...

The Palestinian people have voted in elections. And now the leaders of Hamas must recognize Israel, disarm, reject terrorism, and work for lasting peace.
Good luck with that.

That said: here's the thing. A lot of people are saying, "And look who they voted for!" Well, yeah. What did you expect? The good side of this is that the cards are on the table and you've got a group that's not going to pretend they have ideas they don't have. The bad sides are, well, deeply obvious on every level. Israel's going to build its wall and sit on it for a while, watching. It's going to suck, but if people will be honest again for a while, maybe that's a starting point.

Others say that the government needs to take a larger role in directing the economy, centralizing more power in Washington
That's pretty funny coming from this president.

And we can tackle this problem together, if you pass the line-item veto.
The line-item veto?! That's his solution to the budget deficit? The line-item fucking veto?!

Has this man met a power he doesn't want consolidated to his very own self? He's already saying he can effectively rewrite legislation through signing statements (and Justice Alito is on his side on this, in a position I cannot fathom), now he apparently wants to do copy-editing.

With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker.
That 33:1 Chinese:American wage ratio is pretty severe, though. Too bad China is in no hurry to revaluate the Yuan.

Here's where things get serious:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. ... So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas.

Other sources say that the total energy research budget in President Bush's 2006 budget is actually cut significantly. Saying one thing, doing another; not a plus in my book.

To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy.

zero-emission coal? zero-emission coal? How's that work, then? However: you can do some interesting things with liquified fuels made from coal. Perhaps this is what he means. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that's it.

We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen.

Oh good, the safe, long-term, far-away hydrogen miracle, making Americans think we're doing something when we don't have to worry about actual competition to our core oil business.

We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.

Various sources this morning - including, again to my disgust, NPR - were talking about "breakthroughs" that let cars run on either gasoline or ethanol. Hey, folks, want to see the first one of these?


The Ford Model A
Here's the thing: from what I've been able to read about over the last year, if we donate every square inch of farmland to ethanol and/or biodiesel production, we can produce, ignoring energy input costs, and using the best and newest and hghest-efficiency methods, around 85% of what we currently use for transportation alone as of 2005. Unfortunately, we also need food.

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

A clarification this morning - that he didn't mean that literally and that we'd still be importing oil from the Middle East because that's where most of the oil is - served two major purposes. First, it made the whole statement even more confusing than it already was. As several sources have noted, most of our imports don't come from the middle east. 75% of the amount we currently import from the region is about 1.6Mbpd, which isn't a whole hell of a lot, and it's over a very long timeframe - 20 years in modern political terms translates directly into, "sometime after I'm out of office and I don't have to care." In short, 20-year timeframes are bullshit.

Ignoring that, what this clarification might mean depends upon several unknowns. However, there is a extant (if fantasyland) set of predictions which have nonetheless been used by the government for the last many years, based upon the concept that Saudi Arabian oil suppliers can produce as much oil as is needed to meet demand for the foreseeable future. By 2025, that would assume a production amount of between 20Mbpd and 25Mpbd from Saudi Arabia alone. This will not happen, occasional Saudi governmental assurances to the contrary. But leaving that aside as well, this opens the possibility that he meant 75% of those numbers, reduced by the portion that would be our imports. That would mean a much higher ethanol/biodiesel production target of around 4-5Mbpd. That's still small, but it's much better than 1.6Mbpd. This is actually an improvement, from my standpoint, over the original.

The second thing it did, of course, was smooth ruffled Saudi feathers, telling them not to worry, we'll still be sending dollars their way in droves, and that the whole "weaning ourselves from middle-eastern oil" shtick was just for the rubes and they shouldn't worry about it, particularly not lines like:

and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.

I really get upset at things like this.

What really bothers me is that this president will not ask Americans to face any difficult reality. He'll ask us to give up privacy, he'll ask us to up rights, he'll ask us to trust him with more power on a permanent basis than any President has asked for before...

...but drive more fuel-efficient cars? Move closer to where you work? Pay more for gas to reduce oil dependence and improve our balance of payments over time? Apparently, that's too fucking much to ask. This President talks about difficult choices and sacrifice, but then acts as if the American public is utterly incapable of them, and, as a result, treats the citizenry as children.

I really hate that.

Moving on:

Yet many Americans, especially parents, still have deep concerns about the direction of our culture, and the health of our most basic institutions. They're concerned about unethical conduct by public officials, and discouraged by activist courts that try to redefine marriage.

Well, there's the token fagbashing. Focus on the Family is nonplussed that he gave it so little mention; they wanted a plug for the Federal Marriage Amendment, and didn't get it. Good. Fuck those guys.

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids

Take that, Big Bird!

and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator -- and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale. (Applause.)

Okay, the last line is fundy spooge, but that and Big Bird jokes aside, let's look at what he was really talking about.

This is the kind of research he's asked Congress to ban. What the fundamentalists call "creating human-animal hybrids" is a vital and important method of researching genetic abnormalities; transferring defective human genetics into laboratory animals where these genetic abnormalities don't exist, so that they can be studied with goals to finding treatments and cures. After spending a lot of time talking up science education, he immediately turns around proposes research bans that would cripple American biomedicine, as a reward to his fundamentalist base who have decided that a zygote - most of which die naturally before implantation under the best of circumstances - is a person.

That pre-implantation death rate is important, because, if you ask me, even if you do buy into Biblical literalism, a 70% composite death rate would seem to indicate that Jehovah doesn't give a rat's ass about those fucking floating cells.

Not that this makes any difference to someone talking to James Dobson every week.

This is, frankly, the most disturbing part of the speech. These are exactly the kind of things we need to have the most of if we're going to keep a coherent economy in the face of globalism, and he's helping fuck it up.

A few months ago, I posted a bit of commentary about how the American fundamentalist movement was trying to make the exact same mistake the Arabic countries made in the 13th and 14th centuries. This is that kind of mistake; it's the next mistake in the series of mistakes that lead to failure.

Most of the speech was things I expected. I was glad to see him stiff the fundamentalists on the marriage amendment. I'm glad that some mention is being made of energy, and though I wish it would be taken more seriously than this, at least it's a start. This biology thing, though - that's bad. Hopefully there's enough money threatened that the corporate interests will work to keep it from actually happening, and that will be enough to help the rationalists win.