Just a little info on alternative energy and repukes . . .

[zbdent]

David Stockman's book "The Triumph of Politics", where they cut research funding into "alternative" fuel options.

Paperback edition, first Avon printing, 1987, page 125.

"Among the wasteful corruptions of the Second Republic, the Carter Energy Department stood out in my mind as a great, malodorous garbage dump. The Carter budget had allocated $17 billion for the Energy Department over the years 1982-86. What for? So that it could subsidize such economic white elephants as a multi-billion-dollar coal-liquefication plant for the Gulf Oil Company, windmills, fluidized bed combusters, solar-power towers, gasohol plants, shale plants, Stirling engines, photovoltaic cells, and countless other experiments in high-cost, unproven energy technologies.

There was nothing wrong with all this experimentation. It's precisely the kind of thing Adam Smith had invented the free market to accomplish. But the federal bureaucracy was neither competent nor called upon to usurp the job."

...

"The synfuels (synthetic fuels) plants he (Jim Edwards) was fighting to save would 'put cap on world oil prices,' he (Edwards) said. Never mind that it was not in the power of the U.S. Department of Energy to alter something called the law of supply and demand."

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On a similar note, from "The Blunder Book" (1984 copy) by M. Hirsh Goldberg (who pulls no liberal punches); page 117:

FILED AND FORGOTTEN

During World War II, with their supplies of oil cut off, the Germans, after years of effort, developed a way to derive gasoline from coal. In fact, from 1944 until the end of the war, Nazi tanks ran almost exclusively on coal-derived gasoline.

In 1975, at the height of the oil crisis, a chemical enginer at Texas A&M, along with a colleague, decided to look at captured German documents to see what they could learn about the Germans' synthetic oil program. The two found that the Nazis' voluminous records had been filed and forgotten. Some were at the National Archives in Washington. Others were stuffed into crates in government buildings around the country. Even though the war and subsequent events in the Mideast showed the importance of synthetic fuel technology, until the two professors came along, the documents had lain untouched in government files for thirty years.

[neoblues]

1. Republican thinking (if you can call it thinking) would

go along something like this:

"We Don't Need No Stinkin' Alternate Energy..." (we practically own the middle east now...)