First watch this and this. And then read this.
Showing posts with label oil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil. Show all posts
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Drill, baby, drill!
Read about it here. Maybe Obama's "green jobs czar" can give the new oil rigs some tax breaks in order to stimulate the creation of more "green jobs" extracting petroleum.
Meanwhile... all of the public transit systems in the US are in disrepair, imposing service cuts, and hiking fares. And all of this is allowed to come to pass at the same time that Obama escalates foreign wars and proposes spending freezes on everything except the Pentagon budget.
It's not the Republicans who have forced Obama down this road. This is the road that he and the Democrats in Congress have pursued all on their own. To be sure, the Republicans would have been glad to go this route (cutting social spending, eviscerating public transit, escalating wars abroad, tipping their hat to off-shore drilling, etc.) if they were in power.
But wasn't the point of voting Democrat supposed to have been that they wouldn't simply pursue the same course as the Republicans?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
NYTimes to Mexico: Give US corporations back your oil
Read the NYTimes screed against nationalization here. Man, the Times is terrible when it comes to Latin America. The "argument" in this article is pathetic. It's the same old shopworn right-wing rhetoric about nationalizing resources: "those dumb Mexicans are happy that they booted out the foreign oil companies... but they are too inept to know how to properly extract it... better invite the US corporate experts back in to take the oild back".
As readers of their foreign coverage have come to expect, the Times conflates an important issue of political/economic power with one about efficiency and instrumental virtues. But we can separate these matters. The issue of efficiency of extraction is separate from the issue of whether or not the Mexican people should collectively own their natural resources. If the problem is merely with the former, why not suggest ways in which the extraction could be more efficiently undertaken? Of course, the whole point of the article is not to solve this problem, but to offer us the facile conclusion that the only problem is nationalization. The obvious solution, the article seems to leads us to believe, is that privatization and control of the oil by a small group of wealthy foreign investors is the only way to go.
Of course, nationalization as such is not necessarily a good thing. It matters who "owns" the national state and it matters how the revenues are spent. But even with all of the problems with the Mexican state apparatus, I'll gladly take public ownership of that sort (and the loads of money it provides for education spending) over private ownership by a small clique of foreign capitalists.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
What do you do with used cooking oil?
Recycle it. Well, that is if your city has facilities where you can take your used cooking oil. LA and SF do, unsurprisingly, but I cannot find anything similar for Chicago.
Its something we rarely talk about, but its puzzling: what should one do with a large amount of cooking oil (particularly after deep-frying) after cooking? Pouring it down the drain is about the worst thing you can do... but why send it to a dump when it is (literally) full of potential energy upon combustion?
This is worth taking a look at.
Given the potential energy locked up in the chemical bonds of used cooking oil... why are large municipalities letting it go to waste? Use it to power buses!
Apparently in London McDonald's is already doing something like this. Chicago is VERY far behind other cities of comparable size and stature when it comes to recycling.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
