Bill Nye the “Science Guy” once again took to Twitter to spout doom and gloom about global warming, this time lamenting how gasoline is too cheap.
Nye, who’s not actually a scientist and is best known for hosting a 
science show, says it’s “very bad news” gasoline is selling for less than $2 a gallon — he tweeted out a picture of a gas pump where you could buy fuel for $1.68 a gallon.
Nye’s not the first to lament how cheap oil, gas and coal have gotten since summer 2014 — when oil was more than $100 a barrel. One of the world’s top energy authorities told reporters cheap energy was endangering the fight against global warming.
“I believe low energy prices may complicate the transformation, to be very frank,” Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, told reporters in Brussels Thursday, “and this is a very important issue for countries to note; all the strong renewables and energy efficiency policies therefore may be undermined with the low fossil fuel prices.”
Environmentalists and left-leaning politicians need oil, coal and natural gas prices to be high in order to make green energy projects seem more economic than they actually are. Often governments do this by imposing taxes on fossil fuels or carbon dioxide emissions.
In the U.S., federal regulators are mandating power plants emit less CO2. Policymakers have also offered a slew of subsidies to make green energy attractive to investors.
No matter how governments make energy more expensive, it’s poor people who are hurt the most.
A 2014 report by the Pacific Research Institute found black households in Ohio would spend an extra $408 every year in higher energy costs because of the EPA’s plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
“It’s the green movement’s new Jim Crow law,” Deneen Borelli, outreach director at FreedomWorks, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in 2014.
“These harmful regulations are going to drive blacks into government dependency,” said Borelli, who is an African American. “By harming the fossil fuel industry, you’re harming hard-working Americans.”
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This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller
And bad for the rest of the world’s economies. News flash: the planet is larger than just the US.
best,
D
Explain, please.
Why are low energy prices ‘bad for the rest of the world’s economies’?
I can see that they ain’t great for big producers, but there are far more consumers than producers. And it’s undoubtedly good news for them.
Many countries are dependent on oil revenue for a large fraction of their economies. Low oil revenue means sputtering economy.
Best,
D
Thanks
I can think of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Kuwait, Nigeria and Iran as states largely dependent on oil revenues. But there are 180 others who benefit from lower prices. And for whom high prices are a considerable drag on their economies.
Would you like to reconsider your remark that low prices are ‘bad for the rest of the world’s economies’?. They are undoubtedly good news for the vast majority of states.
Would you like to reconsider your remark that low prices are ‘bad for the rest of the world’s economies’?. They are undoubtedly good news for the vast majority of states.
You should get on the phone and start calming down the world’s bankers and economists then. They don’t know the things you do. They need your reassurance. Bankers leveraged all these drillers and now the drillers can’t make revenue forecasts, and bankers’ gambling is starting to look risky. Again. Let us know what you told them to calm everyone down.
Best,
D
Sure.
Some bankers made some bad gambles and its come back to bite them.
I’m sure they are unhappy. But bankers aren’t economies.
But you still haven’t justified that ‘low prices are bad for the rest of the world’s economies’. How is it bad for, say Italy…a net oil importer. Or India?
Or many other states where the opportunity to displace human/animal labour with cheap imported energy provides liberation from drudgery?
Low oil prices may be bad for oil producers – and their financiers. But they ain’t bad for the rest of us. Cheap energy is good.
OK, thanks!
Best,
D
Sooner the banks
start seriously lending
for renewables the better.
When renewables can provide the same level of reliability as fossil fuels, then perhaps they will.
Burt right now a steam engine with a pile of coal beside it provides a very cheap, very reliable, very controllable source of power. No ‘renewable’ comes close.,
I trust you put your money where your mouth is? I’ve already given through my taxes and have seen through the lies so enough is enough. Your turn to donate to the cause.
A sense of integrity requires
me to say, no, i havnt
lent money to a windfarm
or solar instillation.
Its not my business.
My business is a being
a parent and and an employee
of a construction company.
Occassionally i lend mates
ten bucks if they are short and
i have it spare.
If you don’t like banks. #B^)
Yes, vastly increased supply hits oil exploration pretty bad. And the rest of the economy benefits tremendously.
Yep.
Not withstanding the pollution,
low prices are a good thing.
And not just in oil.
Its a very good thing in food
as well. And housing.
Ya know you got a great economy when theres affordable housing for all.
If there isnt, it aint so great.
Sure thing. If energy is so expensive that women have to walk to the well to draw water rather than have a pump, then you are poor. But pumped water (and pumped sanitation) is a first step out of poverty and squalor.
It was abundant, cheap, reliable fossil fuels that lifted the huge mass of humanity from a peasant existence. If a few bankers are embarrassed by falling prices, so be it. But the rest of us should rejoice.
Id like to say this.
Some folk,when talking about
the most important inventions,
discuss things like writing,
fire making, the wheel, bearings, the sail, yada yada.
For me, its the sheer brilliance
of pipe.
NOTHING beats it for labour
saving when moving fluids.
Its outstanding value for money.
And when pipe is combined
with a grid powered pump,
or even a diesel one,
hoo boy can ya move shit
far, quick, and dirt cheap.
People who do not have pipe
are the genuinely poor.
So much time and energy spent moving a few litres of
water.
IMO some of the most
practical aid for impovrished
people, and especially women,
is simple cheap pipe.
Li D
Australia
Thanks for giving me a new perspective. I hadn’t appreciated the hidden virtues of pipe before. But you are clearly right.
Are you, by any chance, (and following on from my avatar) really the Piper at the Gates of Dawn ;-) ?
Ha! No sorry.
I do like Floyd though.
I was only just listening
to Gavino Loches amazing
Wall cover instumental.
Absolutely shit hot!
Hydraulics are a very interesting subject, I want to store energy in hydraulic accumulators, as invented by Armstrong in the 1800’s.
Yep. Damn interesting,
I agree.
By that logic, low food prices mean the people will starve.
Sure, sure.
Best,
D
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php
O2 Dropping Faster than CO2 Rising
Implications for Climate Change Policies
New research shows oxygen depletion in the atmosphere accelerating since 2003, coinciding with the biofuels boom; climate policies that focus exclusively on carbon sequestration could be disastrous for all oxygen-breathing organisms including humans Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
t is becoming clear that getting rid of CO2 is not enough; oxygen has its own dynamic and the rapid decline in atmospheric O2 must also be addressed. Although there is much more O2 than CO2 in the atmosphere – 20.95 percent or 209 460 ppm of O2 compared with around 380 ppm of CO2 – humans, all mammals, birds, frogs, butterfly, bees, and other air-breathing life-forms depend on this high level of oxygen for their well being [5] Living with Oxygen (SiS 43). In humans, failure of oxygen energy metabolism is the single most important risk factor for chronic diseases including cancer and death. ‘Oxygen deficiency’ is currently set at 19.5 percent in enclosed spaces for health and safety [6], below that, fainting and death may result.
The simultaneous decrease in ocean oxygen not only threatens the survival of aerobic marine organisms, but is symptomatic of the slow-down in the ocean’s thermohaline ‘conveyor belt’ circulation system that transports heat from the tropics to the poles, overturns surface layers of into the deep and vice versa, redistributing nutrients and gases for the ocean biosphere, and regulating rainfall and temperatures on the landmasses. This dynamical system is highly nonlinear, and small changes could make it fail altogether, with disastrous runaway effects on the climate [7] (Global Warming & then the Big Freeze, SiS 20). More importantly, it could wipe out the ocean’s phytoplankton that’s ultimately responsible for splitting water to regenerate oxygen for the entire biosphere, on land and in the sea [4].
O2 Dropping Faster than CO2 Rising
Gasp!
You must be living proof of the stunted reasoning ability due to decreased oxygen. You made the science papers after all Evvie!
Breathe harder.
Now Evvie is your asthma acting up again? Poor sickly deprived little one you are.
Not to mention that just about all industries use oil either directly or indirectly.
Plentiful oil is bad for the world economy? Did I read that right?
Read some economists.
Best,
D
It is a fact that the planet consists of more countries than them thar Ew-Ess.
Best,
D
Preferably some place with oil that will throw rose petals at our feet and greet us as liberators.
Best,
D
Lol. Very true.
Fuck him !
Eveyone, “… knows a guy what knows a guy…”
Read on, and it you want to really take on Global Warming, go after the source: a billion cars spewing 200 cubic feet a minute of 800 degree toxic waste.
Imagine it is the 1920s and there are no ‘gas’ stations…
The only fuel available is alcohol because gasoline has yet to be more than a novelty, the by product of oil well production and hasn’t been ‘refined’ yet…
Imagine the then hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel that can’t be taxed because they can’t FIND every mom and pop moonshiner.
After the Trust breaking of Standard oil, new ‘oil barons’ come into being, one of which is J Paul Getty who DOES come up with the refining of ‘drip gas’, and promises the government that if they will help run the ‘shiners out of business, he will collect taxes on his fuel for them at his ‘filling stations’.
Prohibition allows the appearance of legitimacy and the ‘Revenooers’ go after the Moonshiners and NASCAR is born…
J. Paul Getty is made rich beyond his wildest dreams…
The Government has found a revenue source…
America is on the ‘oil teat’ and 50 years later at the mercy of nations whose faith has sworn to destroy America.
First and foremost, when you look at ‘renewable’ fuel, there is only one that is truly renewable and that is Alcohol because it can be made out of ANY biomass, sugar and yeast and sunlight… That’s right SUNLIGHT. alcohol distills at 140 degrees and the only reason to use heat greater than sunlight is to increase the production rate.
The idea that the choice has to be ‘food or fuel’ by some is… without merit… the sludge from water reclamation plants alone would be one source, right along with the silage/Refuse from crop production.
That is the good news… The bad news is that at approximately 75,000 BTUs per gallon versus gasoline’s 115,000 BTUs per gallon the consumption rate is double that of gasoline, so at present consumption rates the production cannot keep up with consumption.
On that vein, the NEW cars are at best 6.5% efficient, so while 40mpg sounds great, the truth is that this should be at LEAST 60% if we are serious about reducing consumption and pollution.
Raising fossil fuel production is a great short term strategy to get America out of the grip of the Middle East, but it is and remains my opinion that the car companies selling a 120 year old design isn’t a good solution in the long term.
An Alternative: The Internal Steam Engine©
For the last century engines have been internal combustion, squeezing the air to a high density and either mixing the fuel before it was compressed and igniting the mixture or as a diesel, injecting the fuel and allowing the high pressure and temperature to ignite and in both cases, creating combustion and a pressure to drive a piston down.
An examination of the typical Four Stroke engine indicates only 25% efficiency if the engine were ‘perfect’ in every other regard because only 1 in 4 strokes of the piston is used to make power.
When considering that single power stroke, only half of that can be used to develop Torque because at the top and the bottom of the stroke, the crankshaft is moving more sideways than down, so the efficiency is now 12 ½% efficient.
The real culprit is in how we use the power, the engine speed has to vary from idle to ‘full power’, (actually high power but low efficiency) so while the combustion has a fixed period time to burn completely, the piston is nearly always going too fast or too slow to allow the combustion to be either complete or efficient.
The net result is that the actual ‘perfect’ efficiency is about 6.5%, so a gallon of fuel that has 2776 horsepower only delivers 180 horsepower, so instead of 185 miles to a gallon on a fuel like gasoline, the average car gets 12.5 miles to the gallon.
Even if they mount this into a chassis with an electric motor and a pile of batteries, the efficiency perhaps doubles because the engine can be run at a single, most efficient RPM… fuel economy is NOT an indication of efficiency, because you can lower the demand by making the chassis lighter, but the efficiency stays the same.
Even worse is that the batteries have a larger ‘carbon footprint’ than the least efficient engine for production and disposal.
The objective should be to ‘free the flame’, or allow the consumption of fuel at peak efficiency, and use more power strokes of longer duration.
What I propose is to heat the bores to a constant temperature greater than 400* degrees, and inject water into the bores creating steam pressure to drive the piston.
This allows the heat to be on demand, so the fuel consumption is only from the heat used, with power developed from the stored thermal mass of the head and the meter quantity of water to make the power demanded every time a piston is available to power, which would be would be every stroke. In practice, water is injected into the heated bore(s) to produce steam.
The steam pressure is dependent on the quantity of water introduced into the heated bores; (see steam tables). This would quadruple the number of power strokes and could triple the applied pressure bringing efficiencies into the 70th percentile.
This implies that a 4,500 pound vehicle could get 145 miles to the gallon and reduce combustion gases, (pollution) by 90%.
©case number: 1-89587058
Your dimensions are all screwed up. Horse power is a measure of power (energy per time), not of total energy. A gallon of something does not ‘contain xxx horsepower’
I hope the rest of your analysis is better…I didn’t bother reading it.
PS: Using SI units would make your discussion more globally relevant.
kinaz, I only went back to read some of your comments because of Latimer Alder. You see, you had lost me in your second paragraph “cars spewing…toxic waste”.
If we are concerned about toxic waste, which I am, why do we only measure and aim to reduce our Co2 emissions? Co2 is not only benign, it is absolutely necessary to make our plants grow, which then feed everything else.
Too many people believe that Obama’s political statements (“carbon pollution”) can be substituted for science…
Jeez, whaddy think nox reduction
and unleaded petrol is about?
Sorry. I didn’t catch the conversation about unleaded petrol in Paris. Here I thought we had to get away from Co2 emissions. Silly me…
Hahaha funny.
No service stations in the twenties.
Theres alot of conspirital crap
in this post.
And alot of unreality.
I thought CFACT was a serious website. Why do they write about a clown?
The other thing people forget is that more carbon dioxide in the air and the atmosphere is a good thing, not a bad thing. We depend on plant life to survive. More carbon dioxide means more and happier plants. Compare satellite photos of the earth 30 years ago with the earth now, and it’s clear that the desserts are blooming, except in places like california where they’re getting bigger because of active campaigns to lower carbon dioxide. Even if the climate change alarmists are right on the basic science, which they say they have scientific consensus on, they’re definitely wrong on the conclusions they draw, which is plain to see.