The Chevy Dolt

[ednksu]

So if I get this right, the right wants lower energy prices by any pollution means necessary (aka gas go down plz), but they in no way want the government to help companies devolp alternative sources.

Yes, that's right. Expanded oil and gas permitting and exploration will create jobs, revenue, and lower prices. Companies should be free to develop alternative energy on their own dime. This is the true "all of the above approach." You should read the IBD article linked above regarding wind and solar energy, by the way.

The oil and gas industry doesn't develop its energy "on its own dime" either.

Nailed it.  This is the biggest problem I have with the current idiocy in the Republican party.  Why don't we stop giving away tax dollars to the largest most profitable companies in the world.  All the talking points fall flat on their face in the real world.  There is no reason that we shouldn't as a society encourage our government to leverage these companies into clean energy.

[AzCat]

The oil and gas industry doesn't develop its energy "on its own dime" either.

Nailed it.  This is the biggest problem I have with the current idiocy in the Republican party.  Why don't we stop giving away tax dollars to the largest most profitable companies in the world.  All the talking points fall flat on their face in the real world.  There is no reason that we shouldn't as a society encourage our government to leverage these companies into clean energy.

These are some of the dumber talking points from the left.  Where subsidies really go:


Measured on their "real world" (favorite lefty phrase) utility wind & solar are subsidized at a level roughly 100x that of oil & natural gas.   But the real stupidity happens when regulatory authorities mandate use of certain types of energy.  E.g., "X% of this state's electricity shall be generated by renewable sources by YYYY."  Renewable mandates are as stupid & damaging as ethanol mandates.  *ALL* subsidies and regulatory mandates need to die. 

If oil majors don't develop resources on their own dime what, precisely, do you think Exxon did with that $12B in capital expenditures last year?  Or the $19B that includes production expenses?  And do be sure to note the 55.5% effective tax rate while you're screaming about them not paying their fair share:

[michigancat]

These are some of the dumber talking points from the left.  Where subsidies really go:


 

does that chart include federal highway $$$?

[john "teach me how to" dougie]

Is this issue a right/left Dem/Rep thing?

Does anyone believe for a second that a McCain White House would have treated GM differently?

So all the self righteous Libs just want free green stuff and are stupid and lazy and have never worked for nuttin and hate mercia talk is pretty wothless here IMO.

I think the difference would have been that McCain would have let GM and Chrysler go through a normal chapter 11 bankruptcy in which they would have been able to renegotiate labor contracts and be much stronger today.  The only reason Obama stepped in was to save the union jobs. People still need cars and GM and Chrysler would still be making them.

[LickNeckey]

The bailout formula had been established before Barry and the people that were pushing it would still have been in place for McCain.

[AzCat]

does that chart include federal highway $$$?

Rather extraordinarily stupid lefty talking point there.  Those benefit pretty much the entire US economy, not oil businesses.  And those should go away as well.  Time to kick all of the regulation & funding of transportation back to the states. 

[michigancat]

does that chart include federal highway $$$?

Rather extraordinarily stupid lefty talking point there.  Those benefit pretty much the entire US economy, not oil businesses.  And those should go away as well.  Time to kick all of the regulation & funding of transportation back to the states. 

LOL

[LickNeckey]

does that chart include federal highway $$$?

Rather extraordinarily stupid lefty talking point there.  Those benefit pretty much the entire US economy, not oil businesses.  And those should go away as well.  Time to kick all of the regulation & funding of transportation back to the states. 

  wtf is wrong with people

[K-S-U-Wildcats!]

Does anyone believe for a second that a McCain White House would have treated GM differently?

Not sure about McCain. Romney would have, as would any conservative.

Also, I'm in favor of cutting all energy subsidies, including to oil and gas producers. However, as pointed out above, these subsidies don't even come close to wind and solar, and at least oil and gas is useful.

[K-S-U-Wildcats!]

The bailout formula had been established before Barry and the people that were pushing it would still have been in place for McCain.

Aren't you talking about TARP?

[Rage Against the McKee]

Does anyone believe for a second that a McCain White House would have treated GM differently?

Not sure about McCain. Romney would have, as would any conservative.

Also, I'm in favor of cutting all energy subsidies, including to oil and gas producers. However, as pointed out above, these subsidies don't even come close to wind and solar, and at least oil and gas is useful.

[AzCat]

Uh huh.  Not:

Just one problem. Those "subsidies" are not subsidies. They are tax breaks. Of the $4 billion in alleged subsidies to Big Oil, $1.7 billion derives from a domestic manufacturing tax deduction intended to keep factories in the U.S. It is available to every company, not just oil companies. Another $850 million comes from another tax provision, also available to every U.S. corporation, that gives a credit for taxes paid to foreign countries—just as you can deduct your state taxes from your federal income taxes. Yet another $1 billion comes from tax rules that let oil companies treat oil in the ground as capital equipment for write-down purposes, and the rest comes from rules that let oil companies write off certain business costs immediately.
 
Maybe these are dumb rules. Maybe they need changing. But in no sense can they be called subsidies—i.e., money taken from Smith and given to Jones. The failure to tax Exxon more does not increase your payment to the IRS by one red cent.

The greenies want to count normal tax deductions available to every company, or exactly analagous to those available to every company in other sectors, as subsidies comparable to checks actually written to failed & failing "green energy" companies.  Apples  & oranges folks. 

[AzCat]

Does anyone believe for a second that a McCain White House would have treated GM differently?

Not sure about McCain. Romney would have, as would any conservative.

McCain might or might not have bailed out GM & Chrysler but had he gone the bailout route he'd likely have at least have addressed some of the long-term issues that caused them to go underwater in the first place.  Said issues being, of course, the very unaffordable union contracts that Obama left wholly in place.  In doing so Obama kicked the can down the road a few years but that's it.  GM and Chrysler are still union pension & benefit delivery systems that, on occasion, produce cars.  As such they'll fail again and for precisely the same reason. 

[Rage Against the McKee]

Uh huh.  Not:

Just one problem. Those "subsidies" are not subsidies. They are tax breaks. Of the $4 billion in alleged subsidies to Big Oil, $1.7 billion derives from a domestic manufacturing tax deduction intended to keep factories in the U.S. It is available to every company, not just oil companies. Another $850 million comes from another tax provision, also available to every U.S. corporation, that gives a credit for taxes paid to foreign countries—just as you can deduct your state taxes from your federal income taxes. Yet another $1 billion comes from tax rules that let oil companies treat oil in the ground as capital equipment for write-down purposes, and the rest comes from rules that let oil companies write off certain business costs immediately.
 
Maybe these are dumb rules. Maybe they need changing. But in no sense can they be called subsidies—i.e., money taken from Smith and given to Jones. The failure to tax Exxon more does not increase your payment to the IRS by one red cent.

The greenies want to count normal tax deductions available to every company, or exactly analagous to those available to every company in other sectors, as subsidies comparable to checks actually written to failed & failing "green energy" companies.  Apples  & oranges folks.

That is why the graph is broken down by "direct spending" and "tax breaks". The direct spending comparison is $18.3 billion for fossil fuels vs. $11 billion for renewables (if you consider corn ethanol to be renewable). Also, saying tax breaks shouldn't count because they are available to everyone is somewhat disingenuous. They are only available if you meet certain criteria to qualify, and obviously the system is set up to provide a whole lot of tax breaks to the fossil fuels industry.

[06wildcat]

Does anyone believe for a second that a McCain White House would have treated GM differently?

Not sure about McCain. Romney would have, as would any conservative.

McCain might or might not have bailed out GM & Chrysler but had he gone the bailout route he'd likely have at least have addressed some of the long-term issues that caused them to go underwater in the first place.  Said issues being, of course, the very unaffordable union contracts that Obama left wholly in place.  In doing so Obama kicked the can down the road a few years but that's it.  GM and Chrysler are still union pension & benefit delivery systems that, on occasion, produce cars.  As such they'll fail again and for precisely the same reason.

JFC are you actually this stupid? The labor contracts were changed significantly to create a new tier of workers (making about half of their former counterparts) and reductions in retiree benefits (something that was even more pressing than wages).

The UAW played a big part in the near collapse of of GM and Chrysler, they also played a big part in saving both through wage and benefit concessions. The UAW also accepted a stake in the company (held in trust) to take over the health care of retired blue-collar workers.

But yeah, the contracts are wholly unchanged 

[Fake Sugar Dick (WARNING, NOT THE REAL SUGAR DICK!)]

Damaging or Climate Protecting
 

It's quite obvious the left, who are incapable of understanding 1) basic arithmetic, and 2) the concept that the government takes, it doesn't permit you to keep, have no idea what actual oil subsidies are.  As pointed out, most are available to all u.s. corps, not just oil. Denying oil corps that tax benefit just because they are profitable would, of course, be unfair and bad policy. The remainder being how oil reserves are taxed and exploration expensed/depreciated, neither of which are unreasonable given the recognition realization principles the IRS uses in setting such schedules.  In any event, they actually pay about 1/5 of all Corp tax collected, while so-called green energy pays ZERO, NONE, NIL, and is actually a burden on the potemkin coffers of the us treasury, as the government gives them money regardless of whether the ever make a product worth purchasing (thereby destroying any real incentive, but that's another argument) .

As for the highways argument, I cant address it, because I do not know what it is.

Most importantly however, the chevy's dolt is an asinine, poorly thought out boondoggle that would not exist but for the delusions of our faux academic administration. It's like they sit around saying "you know what would be groovy. . .[a bridge to the moon]".

[Fake Sugar Dick (WARNING, NOT THE REAL SUGAR DICK!)]

It's science!!!      Another hater of electric cars and the environment no doubt. 

Electric cars and liberals’ refusal to accept science

By Charles Lane, Published: March 5

President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.”

Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory.

Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate.

GM fell 2,300 units short of its sales target (10,000) for 2011. It is not on pace to hit 2012’s goal of 45,000 units.

So much for Obama’s goal of 1 million all-electrics and plug-ins on the road by 2015.

A123 Systems, a maker of electric-car batteries that has received $374 million in state and federal loans, announced 125 layoffs last fall. The cause: problems at its main customer, Fisker Automotive, which builds expensive plug-in electric cars. Fisker got a half-billion in loans from the Energy Department, though the money was recently frozen because of the company’s failure to meet production targets.

These events confirm the wasteful folly of allocating capital according to the dictates of politicians, such as when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared in November 2008: “A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable. We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car.”

The electric vehicle flop also illuminates a point about science — or the politics of science.

Democrats and liberals are fond of calling their conservative and Republican adversaries “anti-science.” To the extent that the right espouses “creation science,” or disputes established facts about environmental degradation, it’s an appropriate label.

But progressives’ fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy — limitations that themselves reflect stubborn scientific facts.

Stubborn Scientific Fact No. 1: Petroleum packs a lot of energy per unit of volume. (Each liter contains 34 megajoules.) Consequently, gasoline makes a cheap, portable and convenient motor fuel.

By contrast, even state-of-the-art batteries deliver far less energy than gas, in a far bigger package. A Volt can go 35 miles on a single charge of its 435-pound battery. This sounds like a big deal until you realize that a gas-engine Chevy Cruze gets 42 miles per gallon — and costs half as much as a Volt.

It costs a fortune to pump, refine and ship crude oil. Yet even accounting for all that, gas-powered cars are a better value than electric vehicles and will be for some time. Gas savings on the Volt would take nine years at $5 per gallon to offset its higher price over the Cruze, an Edmunds.com analysis found last month.

Gas consumption creates “negative externalities” — instability in the Middle East, carbon emissions — not fully reflected in its price. But another fact about electric vehicles is that their juice comes from the fossil-fuel-burning grid in the first place.

Oh, and how are you supposed to resell your electric vehicle once you’ve driven it five years and the battery is depleted?

Advocates insist that the government should help them crank up mass production of electric vehicles. Once economies of scale kick in, they argue, electric vehicles can compete.

Four decades after the 1973 oil crisis, this logic is wearing thin. Any company that figured out how to build a practical mass-market electric car would be swimming in cash. That no one has done so suggests we are bumping up against the limits of nature, not just politics or economics.

Certainly the many hundreds of millions of dollars that the U.S. government, GM and GM’s competitors have poured into the effort might have been better spent on more plausible energy-efficiency efforts, such as advanced internal combustion engines.

Instead, Big Government and Big Business have focused on the Volt, the Fisker Karma or the Tesla Roadster, none of which is remotely affordable for the “99 percent” of Americans. And yet in his 2013 budget, Obama proposes to boost the tax credit for electric vehicle buyers to $10,000. 

What’s “progressive” about that, I’ll never understand.

[email protected]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/electric-cars-and-the-liberal-war-with-science/2012/03/05/gIQA7SpYtR_story.html

[star seed 7]

good thing oil will be around forever and electric cars will never become affordable.

jesus christ you are so short sighted.

[john "teach me how to" dougie]

good thing oil will be around forever and electric cars will never become affordable.

jesus christ you are so short sighted.

We will one day use alternative (non-fossil) energy for power, but, so far, there is not a viable alternative. Spending money on a failed platform (batteries) is just foolish when we should be working on making the successful platform (gasoline) more efficient while working in the background on new platforms (hydrogen, natural gas). And where is all of this electricity going to come from? The EPA is working every day to shut down coal fired plants, and it's obvious the left is not going to allow any more nuclear plants, the one clean power source that is available and proven.

[Fake Sugar Dick (WARNING, NOT THE REAL SUGAR DICK!)]

good thing oil will be around forever and electric cars will never become affordable.

jesus christ you are so short sighted.

You've given up on the nuclear skateboard and the .  Jeez, talk about short sighted 


Meh, 7 is right, we should all willfully overpay for a car that goes 35 miles in anticipation of oil running out, some day.  Clearly it takes the mandate of government to get past all this short sightedness, as evidenced by its long-term, far-sighted policies such as deficit spending, new/bulletproof entitlement programs, and no budget fiscal gross negligence . . .

[star seed 7]

the first nuclear plant since the 70's is already under construction, or is about to be.  i saw a piece about it a few weeks ago on the news.  which is a good thing imo.  they are 3 or 4 nuclear plant "generations" ahead in europe and asia, and have made them extremely safe now.


i guess where we differ here though, is i don't place number 1 priority on continuing fossil fuels, and instead would prefer we develop alternative energies primarily.  and i have no problem with the government helping that along.

[star seed 7]

good thing oil will be around forever and electric cars will never become affordable.

jesus christ you are so short sighted.

You've given up on the nuclear skateboard and the .  Jeez, talk about short sighted 


Meh, 7 is right, we should all willfully overpay for a car that goes 35 miles in anticipation of oil running out, some day.  Clearly it takes the mandate of government to get past all this short sightedness, as evidenced by its long-term, far-sighted policies such as deficit spending, new/bulletproof entitlement programs, and no budget fiscal gross negligence . . .

once again you completely side step anything i'm talking about.

i've never said everyone should be made to buy electric cars, or that the volt is some amazing machine.  i know nothing about the volt except what you have posted on it, and yeah it sounds pretty terrible.    but you view this bad car as proof that the government shouldn't be helping companies develop electric as a viable alternative.  you act like everything should be perfect all the time.  obviously this is a difficult problem, and i hardly think cutting funding to anyone trying to solve it would help.

[Fake Sugar Dick (WARNING, NOT THE REAL SUGAR DICK!)]

Seven, ever heard of the phrase "throwing good money after bad"?

The government doesn't innovate, it mandates.  This should be quite obvious to anyone in a non-vegetative state.  We aren't disagreeing, you're operating under a false premise, that electric cars are the only long term viable solution to personal transportation needs.  Open your mind, you're thinking like a bureaucrat, think like a scientist.

More importantly, lets all laugh at B.O. touting the Chevy Volt's success three days before they quit making it.  It's soviet satire in the mainstream! 

[star seed 7]

electric is a possible solution.  not the only one.

most likely, the best solution hasn't even been discovered yet, though hydrogen would be amazing.

you think we shouldn't even be researching anything, which seems like the stupidest course of action.

[Fake Sugar Dick (WARNING, NOT THE REAL SUGAR DICK!)]

you think we shouldn't even be researching anything, which seems like the stupidest course of action.

link? 

Believe it or not, the overwhelming majority of technological advances weren't mandated by the government, they were created by people who wanted to make money.