Requiem for Sanity

A bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds. A bushel of corn makes 2.5 gallons of ethanol. It takes 10 bushels of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol to fill the tank of an SUV. The farmer gets $4 a bushel for his corn. That's $40 for just the corn to generate 25 gallons at $1.60 a gallon. Then there is the additional cost to distill, transport and dispense the ethanol. That will probably triple the cost to $4.80 a gallon costing $120 to fill the tank of an SUV.

A bushel of corn fed to cattle produces a little over 5 pounds of beef. The 10 bushels of corn used to make the 25 gallons of ethanol fuel takes 50 pounds of beef off the grocery store meat counter, thus causing a scarcity and driving up the cost of beef to the consumer. Where is the sanity of this? Are we crazy or what?

Three Simple Solutions to the Oil Crisis

There are three simple solutions to the oil crisis. They are: 1) Drill, 2) Drill, and 3) Drill. All it takes is the political intestinal fortitude to tell the loony environmentalists to "take a hike" to implement. Drill in ANWAR. No one lives there. Drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. No one lives there. Drill offshore to California. No one lives there. Drill offshore to Florida. No one lives there. Yet, we collectively let a few loud-mouth vocal environmentalists dictate that we not drill anywhere. We have the technology to drill in deep water (5,000 feet). We have the technology to diagonal drill. We have the technology to horizontal drill. We have the technology to drill in the Arctic. We have the technology to drill in the deepest of jungles. What stops us? The drillers can't get the necessary government permits. So the Chinese drill offshore Cuba within sight of Key West Florida. The Brazilians drill in deep water off the Atlantic Shelf and discover a huge oil deposit. The Russians actively drill in the northern tundra of Siberia. Where do we drill. No where. Are we crazy or what?

We continue to import oil from the likes of the "nut-cake" in Venezuela where gasoline is less than a dollar a gallon. We continue to import oil from the Middle East where they not only have cheap gasoline, but use the huge profits to build an interior snow ski-slope in the middle of the desert. Gasoline in Iraq costs $1.32 a gallon where it is subsidized by who? Us. Are we crazy or what?

A barrel (42-gallons) of oil today closed at $124. Don't look for the price of gasoline to come down anytime soon. We have to hammer our political representatives to get them to listen to us and not them, the environmentalists. Even then if changes could be made today it will be five years before the increased production will be felt at the gas pump. Also, look at the huge royalty payments our government could reap from off shore and ANWAR oil production. Are we crazy or what?

The long, long term solution is HYDROGEN. Water is H2O. Mostly hydrogen. It is a simple process (electrolysis) to convert water to hydrogen. I did it in my high school chemistry class. Only problem is it takes more power (energy) to make it than it generates. Not economical. The by-product of burning hydrogen is water. No pollution. Someone somehow (maybe our government on the order of a NASA program) needs to be working on how to make it economically feasible. There is an abundance of sea water on planet earth. Are we crazy or what?

Irony of our Culture

I find it rather ironic in our moral culture that we knock down the doors and invade a religious cult conclave to remove underage girls to save them from participating in sex with older men. Yet, we not only condone but our government allocates our tax money to support underage girls that have sex with unknown older men and consequently babies for which they get welfare $upport. Are we crazy or what?

I find it rather ironiic that we can go into a religious cult conclave for whatever reasons yet we CAN NOT go into a Muslim mosque to root out jihadists that want to kill us or to catch terrorists hiding in mosques. Are we crazy or what?

Red-Tail Hawk Chick Flies

Today was the day when one of the red-tail hawk chicks decided to leave the nest. I was working in the backyard and suddenly heard a commotion of hawk cries. Some were adult shrieks, others were the sounds a chick makes. I actually didn't see what happened. Don't know if it left of its own accord, or fell out, or was pushed out. Anyhow, I looked up in time to see the chick glide and flap its wings a few times and make it about 75 yards to a lower branch of an old dead oak tree just outside the east corral. Mother hawk glided in and perched on a limb about 5 feet above the chick. Both were making a lot of noise. I went in to get the binoculars, but they were gone when I got back outside. I could hear them farther out in the wooded area south of the barn. I looked at the nest through the binoculars and the other chick was sitting on the edge flapping its wings and chirping though they don't really chirp. Its more like a screech, or something between a chirp and a screech. I heard "mama hawk" and "baby hawk" from time to time all afternoon out in the wooded area. The last I heard them late this afternoon they were somewhere out in the east pasture near a few large trees about 150 yards from the tree with the nest. Couldn't see them, but could hear them. Hope the little guy makes it. I'll know in a few days if I see a second hawk circling around with "mama hawk".

RED-TAIL HAWKS

We have a rather large yard (2.5 acres) with 62 large oak trees. Some are live oaks, some are post oaks, and some are what I call "swamp oaks". They are all tall reaching about 60 to 70 feet to the tops. We also have a few tall pines and a tall magnolia. This spring I noticed a large bird nest high up (about 45 feet) in the fork of one of the oaks. From time to time I saw a pair of red-tail hawks flying to and from the nest. Today, my wife was in the backyard with me and she heard some strange sounds coming from the direction of the nest. I looked and thought I saw some kind of movement, but it was so far I couldn't tell what it was. She got the binoculars and we looked. Sure enough there are two baby red-tails in the nest that we saw. Don't know if there is a third one or not. We saw the mama hawk fly in several times to feed them. The way they are sitting up on the edge of the nest they are probably about ready to try their wings. It will be interesting to watch them learn to fly.

HARD TIMES ARE 'A COMING

I'm a child of the Great Depression of the 1930's. I know hard times.

If things in our government and economy do not change drastically in the next few years then hard times are a coming. You will see $8 or more for a gallon of gasoline before the year 2012. Our economy is based on hydrocarbons (petroleum and coal). The more expensive a barrel of oil the more expensive everything becomes, including food. The price of oil was $2.10 a barrel when I went to work for Standolind Oil & Gas Company in 1954. Today, a barrel of oil is about $112. I don't see anything any time soon to cause it to come down.

We in the United States have been on a 30-year hiatus playing 'footsie' with the looney environmentalists worrying about global warming, spotted owls, snail darters, kangaroo rats, and any other sham crisis you can imagine. It is sad that our elected officials and public policy makers buy into this outrageous nonsense.

Ethanol is NOT the answer. Ethanol is a sham. It costs more to distill a gallon of ethanol than to refine a gallon of gasoline. A gallon of ethanol has 73,000 BTU's. A gallon of gasoline has 127,000 BTU's. Which do you think will take you further down the road?

The immediate solution is to drill, drill, drill for more oil and to build nuclear electrical generating plants. The French get over 75% of their electricity from nuclear plants. We can not drill offshore Florida. We can not drill offshore California. We can not drill in ANWAR where no one lives. We can't even put windmill generators off shore Cape Cod because that is where Ted Kennedy sails his boat. We have not built a new gasoline refinery in the United States in over 30 years. The current ones are old and inefficient, but we can't build new ones. Are we stupid or what? If we could start drilling in ANWAR today it would be 12 or more years before a barrel of oil flowed into the economy.

So, I say: "Get ready, folks. Hard times are 'a coming that will make the Great Depression look like a church picnic."