Since I write mostly for my own practice and amusement, I'm going to spend a few minutes writing about oil, and if you stumble across it and can improve upon it, let me know.  :-)

Oil is the foundation of worldwide energy and thus the worldwide economy.  There is no infrastructure in place for transportation or distribution of energy which can come anywhere close to replacing oil, and to a lesser extent coal.

Oil powers the monster engines that drive the house-sized propellers of the big tankers as they move it around the world, and of course the transport ships that move goods internationally as well.  It powers the big diesel engines that generate the electricity to drive the wheels of the big trains of America and many other parts of the world.  (Europe has electric trains for the most part, but then European electricity comes at least in part from nuclear power plants.  Also, the Europeans have spent money for decades on infrastructure, rail networks, power distribution, etc., because they haven't had to shoulder their own defense spending burden.  We did that.  Lucky Europe.)  And it powers the big trucks that handle the final distribution of products to local retailers and local sale points, on America's interstate highway system and in Europe as well.  You'd be surprised how similar a German or French highway is to an American one in terms of small cars being blown around by big semi trailer drafts.

In America, the distances are so vast that electric trains are out of the question in many parts of the nation.  Electricity is very difficult to distribute over large areas, because physics dictates that long distances of cable provide too much electrical resistance and too much power is lost.  It is inefficient.  Electricity is, because of this, a largely local affair.  The power generation and the customer can't be all that far apart.

But of course oil can be and is transported everywhere in its various forms; it is completely portable energy.  This is one of the reasons it is far and away the most economical form of energy in large scale use today.

Oil production, distribution, refinement and product distribution and sale has a large, complex and expensive infrastructure, paid for and in place except for the newest and most ambitious discovery and production projects.   Other infrastructure, such as the windmill farms being built by ole' T Bone Pickens, require massive initial investments at the very least, and have unknown ongoing costs which are guaranteed to be higher than any proponent says they will be.  Such is life.  Pickens can afford the massive investments.  I wonder if the taxpayers can afford the ongoing subsidies he is after.

Wind power is intermittent.  There is no such thing as storage of the massive amount of electricity that is required to run a nation.  Pickens claims we can use technology that is in place now, and he is right.  It is not, though, the story we think we are hearing from him. 

You see, when the wind is not blowing, the grid still needs power, and so power generating stations must still exist and operate.  They are not easy to start up and to shut down, and it is a costly and slow process to do either.  It would be physically impossible to have power generation stations 'switched off' until the wind stops blowing and then 'switched on' to fill the gap.  And the grid cannot handle 195 % of its capacity; it would melt down and burn up.

This means that wind power on the whole is stunningly inefficient.  Those who see the world covered with big towers and propellers and believe this means no more nuclear stations or oil or coal burning stations are completely misinformed and ignorant.  The estimate by experts is that 95% of power requirements must be constantly 'online'.  That is, for practical purposes, indistinguishable from 100%; as an estimate it's probably wrong, as it doesn't account for population growth or ongoing demand increase.  Either way, sustained large scale power generation from OTHER than windmills would be mandatory, and rather than making old fashioned powerplants redundant, it would make the windmills redundant.

And of course, we are many decades away from anything like replacement capability from other sources, solar or tidal or hydrogen or what have you.  It's all promising, and companies with their eyes on the future are constantly at work on these things.  It requires no taxpayer dollars, only the promise of a possible money-making opportunity.

Do NOT believe that ole' T Bone Pickens is being altruistic; he is investing in the windmills and plans to make money from them, including any subsidies the government might pay in the future to encourage this sort of change.  He is the Nebraska corn grower of tomorrow, with taxpayer dollars in mind and a less than honest presentation of his 'plan'.  After all, to say 'we should develop all possible sources of power in order to free ourselves from the need for foreign oil' isn't a plan, it's just common sense.  It is in the details of the 'possible' where the devil resides.  Do we develop something that is theoretically possible but economically foolish?  Or does 'possible' include affordable or sensible?  Pickens demurs, and builds more windmills.

And speaking of Nebraska corn growers, let's dispense with ethanol as the 'fuel of tomorrow'.  It is now proven (no links here but you can find them) that from beginning to end of the ethanol process, including the farm operation to grow and harvest the corn, the transport to the ethanol making plants, the distribution and the consumption and burning of it, there is more CO2 and more general pollution emitted than in the same process with oil.  Ethanol pollutes MORE than oil, contributes MORE to man-made catastrophic global warming than oil.  (I do not endorse that particular scam, of course; I only mention it here to show the folly of ethanol as a solution to a leftist-promoted 'problem'.)

Ethanol is a non-answer to the environmental question leftists have been asking, and that is unfortunate; at this stage there are massive subsidies in place here and abroad, and just the bureaucratic process of directing the flow of the taxpayer money is a gazillion dollar business with rampant corruption, which by definition is criminal waste of taxpayer money.  This fiscal irresponsibility causes food price increases on a worldwide scale, as farmers are paid by taxpayers to grow corn for ethanol rather then the corn for food or other crops they had been growing.  Competing in the open market to sell your food crop is less attractive than handing over your corn for a guaranteed government check.   And, as usual, the American taxpayer pays for the same product twice.  He pays for the corn subsidies for the dubious 'solution' of ethanol, then he pays again for his own food, at the higher prices his subsidies caused.

It is, of course, the poor who are harmed the most by increases in the price of food.   A rapid tripling of tortilla prices (made from corn) in Mexico recently cause tens of thousands of people to take to the streets in full riot.  If a meal costs $6, and the price goes to $8, the well paid middle class person notices and perhaps complains, but the poor person suddenly cannot afford lunch.

This corn ethanol subsidy racket is mostly driven by the Democrat party.  Yes, this is the party that claims to be the voice of 'the little guy', the poor, the minority, the hardworking blue collar American who needs help surviving the predations of the evil rich, the peasants in other countries who are exploited by evil oil companies and slaughtered needlessly by evil American soldiers. 

Likewise for the socialists of Europe, where the political left is the driving force behind what is an existential threat for hundreds of millions of people who survive from day to day, barely able to afford to eat.

So far, not a word has been said about food prices by any leading Democrat here.  Of course, nothing can be said.  Their position is untenable, and it serves them best if the subject never comes up and the public never puts two and two together on this topic.  Likewise the truth about the inefficiencies and redundancy of windmills, and the unlikely notion that any other source of power except the evil nuclear plant is going to 'break us from our addiction to oil'.  A word on that word, if I may.

We are no more addicted to oil than to food.  It is simply a resource we use to our own benefit.  "Addiction" implies no valid good purpose, only a degradation and slow destruction of ourselves due to an unambiguously bad habit we know we must break but which we cannot.  Oil has good and bad points, and at present the good far outweighs the bad.

More to come when I have another moment to write..... 

I do not believe that this is difficult to understand. 

I do believe that Democrats understand it, which means they lie and slander and misrepresent on purpose.  Yes, I do believe that.

ExxonMobil reports a record quarter of profits, over 11 billion greenbacks.

What they do not report, and what you will NOT hear in the news, is that in the same time period they paid over 32 billion dollars in TAXES.

Democrats, after having smugly held out their hands to take over THIRTY BILLION DOLLARS from ExxonMobil in THIS QUARTER ALONE, now claim that eleven billion dollars was too much to let them KEEP.

That's close enough to a three to one ratio.  After all the work, all the manhours, all the research, all the negotiations, all the COLOSSAL investments and risks taken by this company to develop, bring in and refine oil and gasoline for Americans to use in the process of doing business, the Democrat party believes, BARACK OBAMA believes, that three for the government and one for the company means the company is getting TOO MUCH MONEY.

Three for Uncle Sam, one for the evil rich company.

What's wrong with this picture?