Highway Monument Valley wallpaper
Anita Dancs, an economist with the Center for Popular Economics, notes that “energy security, according to national security documents, is a vital national interest and has been incorporated into military objectives and strategies for more than half a century.” After breaking down the overall military budget and evaluating specific missions, she concludes that “we will pay $90 billion this year to secure oil. If spending on the Iraq War is included, the total rises to $166 billion.” That would already add 56 cents to every gallon of gas we buy.
The late Milton Copulos was a veteran of the Heritage Foundation, an advisor to both President Ronald Reagan’s White House and the CIA, as well as the head of the right-wing National Defense Council Foundation. He was particularly concerned with dependence on foreign oil, and he highlighted how oil imports were both an economic boon to unsavory governments abroad and a missed opportunity for domestic investment. In 2006, Copulos argued that, if you add to oil-related defense spending such factors as the economic impact of periodic oil supply disruptions and the opportunity costs of money spent on oil imports that might have been used elsewhere in the economy, the “hidden” costs of the U.S. dependence on petroleum would total up to $825 billion per year.
“To put the figure in further perspective,” he wrote, “it is equivalent to adding $8.35 to the price of a gallon of gasoline refined from Persian Gulf oil.” At today’s rates, that would hike the price at the pump to approximately $11 per gallon, or more than $250 to fill the tank of a typical SUV.
Regardless of whether an individual citizen drives, or what kind of car they use if they do drive, we all pay the difference between the pump price and the cost of national security related issues involved with taxes.
Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have detected a plume of hydrocarbons that is at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a residue of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The 1.2-mile-wide, 650-foot-high plume of trapped hydrocarbons provides at least a partial answer to recent questions asking where all the oil has gone as surface slicks shrink and disappear. “These results indicate that efforts to book keep where the oil went must now include this plume” in the Gulf, said Christopher Reddy, a WHOI marine geochemist and oil spill expert and one of the authors of the study, which appears in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.
Image courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
So much for the meme that the oil has evaporated or magically disappeared. Bigger picture available at WHOI link.
Another go green make money story – Converting Gas-Guzzlers into Hybrids
XL Hybrids plans to convert taxis, delivery trucks and other fleet vehicles into hybrids, cutting the vehicles’ fuel consumption by 15 to 30 percent. Alt-E, a startup founded by former Tesla Motors engineers, is similarly targeting fleet vehicles, but it plans to make plug-in hybrids that can drive for roughly 40 miles on the energy stored in a battery that’s recharged by plugging in. Once that stored charge is used up, Alt-E’s vehicle will act like a conventional hybrid with fuel economy of 32 miles per hour–more than double that of the prototype vehicle it is working with–a Ford F150 pickup.
A company called Hybrid Electric Vehicle Technologies (HEVT) is also doing hybrid conversions. While there are millions of potential conservation out there I wonder how this business model will be affected by the launch of several hybrids by the likes of GM, Ford and Nissan in the next year. Most of those offerings will be passenger cars, but GM did recently buy a hybrid delivery van company and Ford has plans to sell SUV hybrids.
Jakarta introduces women-only trains to avoid groping
Women-only train carriages were launched this week in Jakarta in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, in an attempt to avert groping and sexual harassment on packed commuter trains.
Women can choose to board the female-only, orange and pink-seated carriages at the front and rear of trains in Jakarta, the latest in a growing number of cities to offer women-only services.
The state-owned railway operator, PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), said it had not received many complaints about sexual harassment but the company had noticed that many women avoided densely-packed trains.
That’s just sad on a cultural level and it doesn’t do the reputation of mass transit much good either.
tangledwing 
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