Overall, gasoline demand was reported at a little more than 8 million barrels per day, which AAA said is a 400,000-barrel-per-day year-over-year decline and at the lowest level since 2003, according to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report.

Despite ample supply and low demand for gasoline, though, the national average for gas prices is still up 10 cents over the previous week, with impending refinery shutdowns and high crude oil prices pushing prices up, according to AAA. The national retail average price for a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline was $3.38 on Jan. 17, a penny more expensive than one week ago, 15 cents more expensive than one month ago, and 28 cents more expensive than a year ago.

From a green economy perspective, this legislation could not be more important. The military’s huge demand for energy translates into enormous market pull. By creating a market for biofuels and green technology, the military can spur further research and drive down the price of clean energy to levels that would be competitive with traditional energy sources. According to analysis presented at a congressional briefing on the Defense Department’s Deployment of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, section 526 sends positive signals to the green energy sector by reassuring clean energy producers that their investments will be met with steady demand from the DoD. Such stability is critical for any burgeoning industry.

Read the rest at the Epoch Times.

Some industry advisors blame commodity speculators for the gouging at the pump, while others say a booming Chinese market and weakening dollar are to blame for near-record pump prices. Still others claim it’s the work of the Obama Administration to raise energy costs in order to make alternative sources of energy competitive in price. (After all he did promise to do just that during his campaign.)

Regardless of the cause, the reality to commuters and business owners is a painful reminder of the summer of 2008 when rocketing energy prices caused a wide ripple effect on prices in nearly every sector of the economy. Many businesses were in a panic about paying surging fuel costs while keeping prices low and people employed. Consumers felt it everywhere, but especially at the pump with painful total sale costs per tank of gas.

So what will $5 per gallon gasoline mean to you?

Will you choose to car-pool, buy a more efficient car, walk or bike to work (where possible), take fewer trips, buy gasoline on discount-days, adopt eco-driving habits, or cut-back in other areas of spending to afford your normal driving habits?

• Retail gas prices rise in spite of supply glut and reduced Middle East tensions — Retail gasoline prices have continued to rise in California and around the rest of the U.S., in spite of falling oil prices, mounting optimism about Middle East unrest, and U.S. fuel supplies so plentiful that their like has not been seen in 17 years.
  .
• All-New Ford Focus Features EcoMode to Help Drivers Perfect Eco-Driving Techniques — “The foot of the driver has one of the biggest impacts on real-world fuel economy of a vehicle and was the starting point for the development of EcoMode,” said Thomas Schick, an engineer with the Ford of Germany Core Vehicle Integration team who helped design the software. “This is a useful tool that creates awareness between personal behavior and fuel consumption and offers up hints on how to improve. Applying those hints and recommendations is all up to the driver.”
  .
• UCR study focuses on ‘eco-driving’ — The UCR Engineering Center for Environmental Research & Technology, along with researchers from UC Berkeley and UC Davis, are conducting the study with Earthrise Technology Inc. to determine what driving behaviors lead to the least fuel consumption.
  .
• Using Instant Feedback for “Eco-Driving” — Eco-driving technology and behaviors can be implemented immediately, with little cost and investment in transportation infrastructure, supporters of the technology say. It’s also a simple way of reducing transportation-related carbon emissions. The final report is expected to be published in the spring of 2012.
  .
• Fleet Hero grey fleet management award — Paul Jackson, managing director of The Miles Consultancy, says there are side-benefits for staff in smarter driving courses…Jackson says fuel consumption and emissions can be cut by nearly a quarter when drivers use eco-driving techniques of reading the road farther ahead, cutting out aggressive braking and slowing at roundabouts, rather than stopping, if the road is clear.
  .
• Study: Average lifetime car insurance costs estimated at $84,000 — Insurance.com based its analysis on quotes from drivers who first purchased insurance at age 21, married at 27, briefly insured two teens and stopped driving at age 75. The average premium includes drivers with all types of claims, accidents and other driving histories.

It’s “certainly possible” that the price of a barrel of oil will push above $100 a barrel, Daryl Guppy, CEO of Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Thursday. “Once you move above $100, then $110 is just clear freeway straight to that level,” Guppy added.

Watch the video here.

The former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister, says Americans could be paying $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012.

In an interview with Platt’s Energy Week television, Hofmeister predicted gasoline prices will spike as the global demand for oil increases.

“I’m predicting actually the worst outcome over the next two years which takes us to 2012 with higher gasoline prices,” he said.

Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with Oil Price Information Service says Americans will see gasoline prices hit the $5 a gallon mark in the next decade, but not by 2012.

“That wolf is out there and it’s going to be at the door…I agree with him that we’ll see those numbers at some point this decade but not yet.” Kloza said.

Gasoline prices have been steadily rising. Last week, gas prices crossed the $3 mark for the first time since October 2008. According to AAA figures, prices are up 4% from a month ago and 16% from the $2.585 average a year ago.

Read the entire original story.

But time is short, and we can “do better” sooner. We can take meaningful action now, every day, starting today.

Leonardo da Vinci inspires me with this quote:

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”

We must do.

I day-dream about the impact of 3/4 million people waking up tomorrow, starting to work, and quietly deciding that today they will not compete with the other drivers on the road for position. Today they will not race to the next stoplight. Today they will try to maintain more distance in front of them to allow a little coasting before braking. Today they will move to the middle or the right on the highway and slow down 5 or 10 MPH. This week those people will go an additional 25 or 50 miles on a single tank of gas – possibly more, maybe enough to skip a fill-up for a day or two.

If all 750,000 squeezed another 50 miles from a full tank of gas this week, that’s 37,500,000 “carbon-free” miles traveled. At $0.12/mile avg. cost that’s $4.5 million dollars saved – ($6/ea) to be saved or spent elsewhere. Repeat that process each week, and you see it can add up to significant numbers very quickly. And that’s ONLY considering 750,000 people – imagine what would happen if each of them told two friends about what they are doing and impressed them to try.

It’s easy to do. You can track your personal per-tank mileage by setting your trip odometer at each fillup. If you want better data, keep your receipts and use a notepad, a spreadsheet, or a free website like FuelClinic to track your MPG over time, and look for ways to improve your score (see links below for additional techniques).

We all feel the urgency. We know what to do. The only questions is – are we willing? If you are willing, then you must DO.

—

Learn more fuel-efficient driving techniques here:

http://www.fuelclinic.com
http://www.ecodrivingusa.com
http://www.fueleconomy.gov

—

Video: Together We Are More Powerful Than Oil

The 20th century was the century of oil. Wars were fought over it, and the outcomes of the century’s biggest conflicts hinged on the stuff. In World War I, for instance, Churchill’s conversion of the British Navy to oil gave the crown’s ships supremacy over German vessels. In World War II, when the Nazis and Japanese each failed to secure supplies of oil, they were doomed. Later, President Ronald Reagan, CIA Director William Casey, and America’s Middle Eastern partners manipulated global oil production to bankrupt the Soviet Union and win the Cold War. In the first half of the century, oil policy served as the catalyst for military victory. In the second half, oil helped propel the greatest economic expansion in the history of the world, and liberated mankind from the tyranny of immobility.

All hail oil! But not too much, because the 21st century won’t be defined by oil. It is more likely to be defined by a different fossil fuel: natural gas…

…Natural gas may also change how we drive, and enable ordinary consumers to break oil’s monopoly on transportation. As my colleague, Peter Huber, notes in a recent Manhattan Institute report, “Gas-handling technologies [have] improved quite enough to make natural gas a practical alternative” to oil. After all, gas is cheaper than gasoline and diesel per unit of energy. That’s why large stationary power plants that used to run on oil switched to natural gas long ago.

The chief obstacle to developing a natural gas infrastructure capable of supplying service stations and highway rest stops is regulatory. If that is removed—and here we do need government action—we could expect to see trucks, buses, and cars running on natural gas in a relatively short period of time. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would be considerable.

We may also see continued inroads of gas into the electricity-generating sector (which can also affect transportation as we move to hybrid and electric vehicles). Gas emits about half as much carbon per unit of energy as coal. With worries about long-term gas supplies allayed, expect regulators and utilities to favor construction of new gas-fired power plants over controversial coal plants, which are more expensive to build anyway. This same thing happened during the 1990s, and gas shot to a 20 percent share of America’s electricity economy as a result.

Read the whole thing… then add your comment below, or over at our Facebook page. What do you think – is LNG a viable transportation fuel, or will it always be relegated to highly controlled and well-maintained systems like power plants – venturing out on the roads only in bus fleets and corporate utility companies?

Charging motorists for every mile they drive could be more reliable than fuel taxes to pay for bridges, highways and transit systems, but would be hard to sell to motorists, according to a national policy group.

A RAND Corp. study released last week concluded there were good reasons to switch from charging gas taxes to charging fees based on how far each car or truck travels. The government gets most of the money for road construction and maintenance from gas taxes, but cars and trucks put more wear and tear on roads while inflation and better fuel efficiency make the fuel tax worth less and less, said Paul Sorensen, lead author of the study…

…Collecting the fee would be more expensive than administering the gas tax; putting tracking units in cars likely would raise privacy concerns; and changing the fee wouldn’t be any more popular than changing the federal gas tax — which hasn’t increased from 18.3 cents per gallon since 1993, Sorensen said.

Read the whole article here, then join in the discussion over at the FuelClinic Facebook page.

As we all live in the present, it is very hard to fully assess the future implications of decisions supported or made by political and business leaders. An extraordinary game of geo-strategy is under way to lock in long-term agreements, notably in the energy sector. At a global level, the transit routes of future oil & gas pipelines become the object of a power struggle involving not only the suppliers and end-users but also the transit countries. Intensive courtships are under way where a ménage à trois, or more, may be the best option to prevent any country from being in a dominating position to rule a region and exercise political or economic pressure.

Let’s take a practical example and look at some of the dynamics behind the Nabucco pipeline and at the different interests involved.

Nabucco and the competing projects

Nabucco is a 3,300 km natural gas pipeline going East to West, with a capacity of 31 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year that would reduce Europe’s dependency on gas supplied by Russia. It will go from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. That project would be in direct competition with the Russian-endorsed South Stream pipeline, with a capacity of 63 bcm per year, that would start from Russia and end in Austria but with two prongs: one via Bulgaria, Greece, and Italy, and one via Serbia, Hungary and Slovenia. Nabucco’s estimated cost is about  €8 billion with a completion date of 2014 while south Stream’s estimated cost is from  €19 to €24 billion with a completion date of 2015. South Stream was launched in 2007 when Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev was then Chairman of the Board of Directors of Gazprom, Russia’s largest company and the world’s largest gas producer.

Nabucco and the supplier countries

Formidable battles have been taking place between the Nabucco and South Stream backers to sign supply agreements, not only to guarantee that the much needed gas will be made available – as underutilizing the pipelines is not a viable option – but also to secure a political and financial will for the projects. Gazprom is engaged in a battle to preempt gas supplies and to keep European countries from what it considers as a Russian natural chasse guardée such as Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, though both countries have pledged to supply Nabucco as they understand their vulnerability by not having several export routes.

The courtship is ongoing and in October 2009, Alexey Miller, Chairman of Gazprom, personally went to Baku, Azerbaijan to sign a long-term natural gas purchase and sale contract with the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR). Following the signature, Miller made a statement, which gives a good insight on what is at stake: ”Russia and Azerbaijan have a common border and have already been connected by the unified infrastructure. This enabled Gazprom to propose the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic the most attractive commercial terms and conditions of gas purchase. Our partnership is logically consistent and fully meets our mutual interests. I am confident that in the coming years the volume of Azerbaijani gas supplied to Russia will increase.”

This statement and contract are interesting because the agreement provides for a supply of 500 million cubic meters starting in January 2010, with potential increases depending on Azerbaijan’s export potential. This comes at a time when Gazprom has interrupted its deliveries of gas from Turkmenistan since April 2009, arguing a lesser demand from Europe. A few days after being in Azerbaijan, Miller was meeting with the President of Turkmenistan but no decision was reached regarding resumption of gas imports from Turkmenistan.

Who is holding whom by the tail?

The dynamics around Nabucco when looked at closely highlights a web of sweet deals corresponding to a complex reality of entangled needs.

Russia has very aggressively pursued locked-in supply agreements for extensive periods of time. The initial idea is that getting a deal in first could work towards keeping other players out. That approach did not end up creating exclusive relationships as countries such Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan appear to have enough supplies to satisfy multiple parties. Pricing agreements were also locked in for specified periods of time but the tumble in world energy prices put Gazprom in a dire situation: Gazprom is reported to have been paying $375.50 per thousand cubic meters (tcm) for Turkmen gas while only paying $217/tcm for Kazakhstani gas and $210/tcm for Uzbek gas. An “unfortunate” explosion in April 2009 that the Turkmens blame on Russia hit the pipeline connecting the two countries and deliveries have stopped. Gazprom stated it had not intention to resume purchasing Turkmen gas in 2009. Turkmenistan is said to be losing $1 billion/month over this issue. With Turkmenistan, Gazprom has a 25-year sale and purchase agreement Turkmenneftegaz signed in 2003. Prices were locked below world market prices, at less than half the price Europe was paying for its gas.  Subsequent price increases were negotiated but in exchange for the promise of higher delivery volumes with 60 bcm of gas in 2007, 60-70 bcm in 2008 and subsequently export up to 80 bcm annually through 2028.

Needless to say that Turkmenistan’s announcement in July 2009 of its willingness to provide gas to Nabucco does not come as a surprise in this context. Similarly the completion in October 2009 of $400 million 188-km section in Turkmenistan of a 7,000 km natural gas pipeline that will reach China is an important step towards diversification. The Turkmen government stated: “Getting gas supplies to China will mark another important milestone in the successful implementation of Turkmenistan’s strategy of diversifying energy export routes to world markets.”

Turkmenistan has been assiduously courted because of it immense gas reserves. In 2008 the oil advisory firm Gaffney Cline & Associates (GCA) conducted a study on the South Yolotan-Osman field and determined that that field alone was the fifth largest in the world, with an estimated 4 trillion to 14 trillion cubic meters of gas. That good new was tampered in October 2009 when reports surfaced that GCA may have been misled (see article: “Turmen Gas – Caveat Emptor” http://www.oilprice.com/article-turkmen-gas-caveat-emptor.html . In any event, the potential of Turkmenistan should not be underestimated.

Nabucco and the transit countries

Several Eastern European countries have been turning their back to Russia and have joined the European Union, espousing the EU’s energy security objectives to reduce its dependency on Russia gas.  The January 2009 showdown between Russia and Ukraine, which resulted on the gas supply to be cut to most of Europe in the midst of winter, could only serve as a wake-up call for the need to diversify energy routes. Bulgaria – which has the ambition to become an international gas hub and that is a party to both the Nabucco and South Stream projects – will benefit from that situation, notably by increasing its bargaining position to negotiate better energy agreements with Russia. It could, among other things, threaten to raise transit fees. Ukraine is using this threat against Russia and in September 2009, Gazprom expected Ukraine to increase gas transit fees by up to 58% in 2010. The stakes are high as transit fees represent a bonanza. While visiting Bulgaria in 2007, Vladimir Putin estimated that Bulgaria could earn up to $2.5 billion per year in transit fees alone.

Russia: just another shrewd player but…

One may think that Russia pockets the difference from rates below market prices, but the reality is that Russia uses the discounted gas for its own domestic needs. It also has been using it to supply Ukraine under very favorable terms, and Ukraine has been very vocal in resisting Russia’s attempts to raise prices. Note must be made that Ukraine imports the bulk of its natural gas from Turkmenistan via Russia. Countries like Russia and Ukraine have been resisting passing on price increases to end-users to avoid social unrest and have been struggling to keep non-competitive industries afloat. One way of doing so is by keeping the cost of energy low. The adverse effect is that Ukraine is one of the most energy inefficient countries in Europe.

A point must be made that Russia should not just be perceived as a natural bully but more as a wounded bear. Russia, like any country, is looking after its own interests and is not always subtle about it, even more so as it feels that everyone is ganging against her, rightfully or not. Russia is also confronted with its own economic reality, most notably the over reliance of its economy and state budget on oil & gas revenues. Efforts to diversify the economy have failed to generate visible results. It is therefore essential for Russia to secure a guaranteed income flow from the sale of it oil and gas, and from the oil and gas of its neighbors, that it buys to resale at a profit or that it routes through its extensive pipeline network for a fee. But things change: sourcing oil and gas from or routing it via Russia is no longer the only option.

… a new transportation mode is emerging

As the gas pipeline battles are under way, a new trend is emerging which is the transition towards Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). That transportation mode of natural gas through seaborne tankers will open new markets, alleviate the dependency of some countries on existing pipeline routes, and reduce the number of players able to impact proper delivery and pricing.

This article was written by Philip H. de Leon for OilPrice.com – Who offer free information and analysis on Energy and Commodities. The site has sections devoted to Fossil Fuels, Alternative Energy, Metals, Oil prices and Geopolitics. To find out more visit their website at: http://www.oilprice.com

While many Western investors remain fixated on somehow acquiring a slice of Turkmenistan’s natural gas riches, despite a recent scandal over the country’s actual reserves, there is another country further east whose energy and mineralogical reserves have been overlooked – Uzbekistan.

While a number of factors are responsible for this oversight, including relative geographical isolation (Uzbekistan, along with Liechtenstein, is one of the world’s doubly landlocked nations, requiring crossing two other nations to gain access to the oceans), which currently limits energy exports available for the global market, there are a number of pluses that the country has for investors willing to “think outside the box.”

With a population of 27 million, Uzbekistan is Central Asia’s most populous and dominant power. A conservative fiscal policy since 1991, including inconvertibility of the national currency, the som, has shielded its citizens from the hyperinflation that ravaged other former Soviet republics, but the policy previously diminished potential foreign investment.

Since the global recession that began a year ago, however, Uzbekistan’s fiscal conservatism, previously dismissed by the foreign investment community, has looked more and more like a pragmatic policy that isolated the country from the worst aspects of the recession in stark contrast to other post-Soviet states that fervently embraced free market capitalism like Lithuania, whose economy contracted 18.1% this year and is expected to shrink further by 3.9% in 2010. In a move certain to be welcomed by foreign investor Uzbekistan is slowly moving towards making its currency convertible but whenever it happens, for the present the country offers a fiscal stability unmatched by many of its more free-market neighbors.

And now, the good news about the country’s resources. In 2006 Uzbekistan’s natural gas reserves were estimated at 1.798 trillion cubic meters (tcm). During the Soviet era Uzbekistan was the USSR’s third-largest producer of natural gas, accounting for more than 10% of the Soviet Union’s production, trailing only Russia and Turkmenistan. In 1992, the country’s first year of independence, Uzbekistan produced 42.8 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas. Uzbekistan currently produces 60 bcm of natural gas annually, an amount nearly equal to Turkmenistan’s production. Uzbekistan’s reserves are primarily concentrated in Qashqadaryo province and near Bukhara in the country’s south-central region. During the 1970s Uzbekistan’s largest natural gas deposit at Boyangora-Gadzhak was discovered in Surkhandaryia province north of the Afghan border.

Unlike its energy-rich neighbors to the West, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, nearly 80 percent of Uzbekistan’s production, about 48.4 bcm, is currently reserved for domestic use at heavily subsidized rates. Of the remaining 12 bcm of natural gas that Uzbekistan exports, more than half currently goes to Russia, with the remainder to neighboring Central Asian states.

Under Uzbekistan’s fiercely patriotic President Islam Karimov relations with Europe’s favorite bête noire, Russia’s state-owned gas firm Gazprom, have been subject to fierce negotiations to win an equitable price for the country’s exports. Like other former Soviet republics, the Uzbek government chafed under Gazprom’s “buy cheap, sell dear” policies and in early December 2008 scored a significant negotiating success by getting an agreement that in 2009 Gazprom would pay $305 per thousand cubic meters (tcm). To put the accomplishment in perspective, Uzbekistan’s state gas company Uzbekneftegaz sold gas to Gazprom for $130 per tcm in the first half of 2008, which then rose to $160 in the second half of 2008.

Those betting on the eventual pacification of Afghanistan and the subsequent pipelines that would crisscross the country to deliver Central Asian gas to the massive Pakistani and Indian markets would also do well to take note of Uzbekistan’s persistent, low key policies over more than a decade attempting to bring peace to its hapless southern neighbor. The initiatives put forward by Uzbek President Islom Karimov during the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008 take on heightened importance as one of the few foreign policy ideas offering some hope to quelling Afghanistan’s three decades of turmoil. The text of Karimov’s address is at http://www.jahonnews.uz/eng/sections/politics/address_by_president_of_the_republic_of_uzbekistan_he_mr_islam_karimov.mgr.

Nearly completely overshadowed by the Bush administration’s relentless efforts to have Georgia and Ukraine join the alliance, Karimov proposed that the UN’s Afghanistan “6 plus 2″ assembly, established in 1999, be revived by expanding it into a “6 plus 3″ ensemble by including NATO because of its anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan among the “six” members Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, China and Iran and the “two,” the United States and Russia.

Noting that that it is impossible to solve Afghanistan’s problems without the direct involvement of neighboring countries, which have felt the destructive impact of the Afghan crisis for more than 30 years, as Afghanistan’s problems are now of global nature, Karimov told his audience in Bucharest that their resolution must also be global, with the participation of members of the international coalition that comprise NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Karimov concluded by noting that the current situation in Afghanistan precludes a purely military solution and that while it is possible to continue increasing the foreign military presence there, without a clear model of national reconciliation it will be impossible to end the conflict.

Needless to say, one of the benefits of peace and the aforementioned pipelines for Uzbekistan would be that it could export its surplus gas through Afghanistan to southern Asian markets for a higher price than it receives at home or Gazprom’s miserly accountants. Acting on Tashkent’s belief that economic assistance is of greater utility than military operations, Uzbekistan has become involved in a host of reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, including railways, power generation, mining, agriculture, irrigation, education and the exchange of specialists as well as providing its neighbor with construction materials, metals, fertilizer, food and other goods. Uzbek companies and engineers have built 11 bridges in the Mazar-e-Sharif-Kabul area and are finishing the construction of a 275-mile high-voltage line capable of transmitting 150 megawatts from Termez to Kabul across some of the world’s most mountainous terrain, which when it becomes fully operational next month, will provide power and light not only to the capital but the country’s five northern provinces.

For now, Uzbekistan remains largely a transit country rather than a net energy exporter in its own right. But the fiercely independent nationalist policy that Tashkent has followed since 1991 indicates that any company whose policies most benefit the country will have an inside track, and as the old saying goes, “fortune favors the bold.” Chinese, Malaysian, Russian and South Korean companies have already begun investing in Uzbekistan’s energy infrastructure – what do they seemingly know that American and European companies do not?

This article was written by John C.K. Daly for OilPrice.com – Who offer free information and analysis on Energy and Commodities. The site has sections devoted to Fossil Fuels, Alternative Energy, Metals, Oil prices and Geopolitics. To find out more visit their website at: http://www.oilprice.com

The mandated “engine destruction procedure” is dangerous – spewing hot oil and coolant into the air around the engine compartment – and in some cases starting fires in the engine compartment. Wait until someone is maimed for life from a steam explosion during this procedure.

The mandated “engine destruction procedure” is filthy – causing a maximum amount of emissions from the engine during the procedure. High temperatures also cause engine coolant (a poison) to boil and sometimes explode from the engine with an uncontrolled low-pressure steam explosion. 

The mandated “engine destruction procedure” is wasteful – all internal engine parts need not be destroyed to render the car “un-sellable”. All that is needed is a simple annotation in the state’s vehicle VIN record that the car is “scrap”, and you can not get a title for that car – no one will buy a car they can not title.  You can then recycle those car parts into the used-car-parts market.

Here’s a YouTube playlist with over 80 Cash-For-Clunkers “Engine Stop” videos:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FEAC2AC1708B4D61

The CARS program effectively buys and destroys your old oil-addicted vehicle, and helps you replace it with a moderately more fuel efficient oil-addicted vehicle – prolonging the overall lifespan of our oil-addicted fleet of vehicles in American garages!

The government jumped too soon… we don’t have viable alternative-fuels established yet to usher in the much anticipated post-petroleum era in transportation… If you are truly trying to fix our problems, you’d have waited to incentivize a change to whatever is “next” – instead of prolonging the history of 100% oil-dependency.

(Of course we could have had at least some choice with FlexFuel, had Congress not failed to mandate this low-cost alternative be built-in to new cars many times over the last few years.) 

Even worse, Congress is so enamoured with the “success” of CARS that they are going to fund it up some more by taking money out for real energy efficiency research programs! 

It boggles my mind really – and I’m a fuel-efficiency nut who spends much of his “free” time promoting fuel efficiency! You’d think I’d love this program… instead I can’t get beyond what and an ugly display of excess it is to needlessly destroy working vehicles that still have value. 

My brain is about to have an  uncontrolled low-pressure steam explosion of it’s own.

The NY Times says Government Can Promote Energy Efficiency – why not start with a program that can actually accomplish a great deal of success w/o a great deal of up-front costs?

Far from a model of energy-efficiency, the CARS (Cash for Clunkers) program creates a system that encourages mind-boggling waste of energy, money, and natural resources.

The word “clunker” makes you think of cars with no real value left, in poor mechanical shape, incredibly inefficient, outdated, unsafe, and already a problem for the owner. The government program assumes the clunker is such a problem that the it requires that the “trade-ins” drive-train be destroyed within 2 days, else the dealer is fined $15,000. In reality, there are perfectly good vehicles with lots of value remaining – and can get measurably much better mileage if driven efficiently - being turned in and destroyed. 

Take for example this video of a decidedly “un-clunky” Volvo S40 or S80 being destroyed as part of the CARS program. All of the energy used to produce that car is completely wasted, even if it would still have value in the used car market.

WARNING: This is a surprisingly graphic video – especially if you are a “car guy”. This top-quality machine literally screams as the “liquid glass” solution (used in place of motor oil) scours the moving parts inside this engine, eventually overheating it enough to start a fire in the engine compartment, and puking it’s last remaining ounces of red-hot oil out onto the ground in front of it as it finally seizes up.

Some thoughts on this video:

1. That’s a well engineered, safe, and fairly efficient high-quality car that apparently ran well when turned in.
2. It has obvious value remaining (KBB says around $13K).
3. I can’t believe it ran for over 4 minutes with sodium silicate instead of oil. 
4. Thank goodness it didn’t puke up that red-hot oil all over the young man as he reached across the engine to put the oil fill cap (?) back on.  

On Wednesday it was announced that the program was suspended – some say it was because dealership couldn’t get their paperwork filed fast enough to not go bankrupt in the short-term, others said it was because the program was too successful and already “spent” all of it’s funding. Then yesterday it was announced that the program would be re-funded, using grants previously slated for other energy-efficiency improvement programs. 

I propose a different plan called: “Cash for Un-Clunkers”

Can anyone answer me “why” we should scrap perfectly good cars instead of invest in improving driving habits?