So, for about the next three weeks I'll be very busy finishing up a compressed Biology class, so the posts are going to be few and far between. But I do intend to add some more functionality to the site (which requires much less time than fact checking my posts). So for the most part I'm just going to post some links to news I'm following.

For instance...

China could be facing their own economic beast from the post peak oil world, but their government price controls hide but do not solve the higher energy prices. This is similar to what I explained earlier how the “Gas Tax Holiday” is form of corporate welfare that hides actual market prices. In China this is a similar reaction that keeps pump prices low with money taken from the governments tax budget. This leads to monetary devaluation and market inflation.

also...

So the report on climate change that the Bush administration delayed for 4 years came out and concluded that current climate change is “very likely” caused by humans. This interests me for the correct language use rather than the conclusions it makes (which have been well known for several decades). You see climatology, like all other sciences, is incomplete and will most likely remain that way unless we find a way to travel back in time and study the history of climate change directly. And grand predictions like linking global climate change to specific causes are never 100% certain as long as the science is incomplete. But, that doesn't mean that the conclusions are too flimsy to be acted upon. In that sense using the term, “very likely”, is a very, very strong statement, one that should be acted upon by all reasonable means.

    I don't want this to be specifically, politically critical here, but this “Gas Tax Holiday” is an utter load of bullshit. So it is impossible for me to avoid going out and advising anyone and everyone against this “bread and circuses”, “corporate welfare” plan. Putting it simply, Hillary Clinton and John McCain somehow think it is OK not to collect roughly 20 cents worth of taxes on every gallon of refined petroleum. They say the savings would be passed on to the consumer.

    This is blatant misdirection.

    The only people who have anything to gain from this are the oil companies who will be able to sell more gasoline and diesel over the summer than normally without cutting their profit margins.

     Let me explain how that works. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel. If you eliminate that tax, then the oil companies get to pretend that the raw cost of crude has dropped that much, when in fact it is and will be rising all summer long as demand increases, a demand that will be compounded because of the artificial drop in price. The plan gives no way to make up for the shortfall in government taxes of an estimated $10,000,000,000.00(ten billion) that is used primarily to maintain the roads and bridges that we drive on. So we're not going to reduce the cost of gasoline and not maintain the roads, that wouldn't make much sense would it?

     No, we're not. Instead we're going to borrow the money to keep road projects running. And we all know what happens when the US borrows more money right? The value of our currency drops. And the value of our currency is what determines how much a barrel of crude oil to produce gasoline costs right?

     So this plan would cut the tax, save consumers a little bit of money on gasoline(misdirection here), keep the demand for gasoline high which would keep the price of crude rising, borrow money to cover the lost tax revenue, which devalues our dollars, meaning each dollar buys less crude oil on the global market, end result the price of gasoline now increases based on pressure from two fronts, “increased demand” and “depreciated trade currency”. And more importantly, nothing has been done to help us move away from this increasingly unhealthy dependency on foreign oil.

     This is an utterly stupid plan that will only make things worse.