Okay, maybe that's not news, but it's certainly irritating. Case in point:
Congress has no idea where we get our energy.
The article itself has already been posted a couple of times on kos. Here's the basic idea:
WASHINGTON, April 6 (Reuters) - A House committee voted on Wednesday to expand U.S. daylight-saving time by two months to help reduce energy consumption
Okay, so what makes this so stupid?
Here's the infratigably stupid part:
Supporters of the amendment, sponsored by Michigan Republican Fred Upton, said it would save about 10,000 barrels of oil a day because offices and stores would be open while it was still light outside and therefore use less energy.
Hey, great! We'll have our stores more in the daylight, and that will make us use less oil because...because...Because we don't use the headlights on our cars? That must be it, because
we don't use oil to light our offices and stores, damn it.
You bunch of friggen' beltway idiots, we don't use oil for electricty. Jesus. Every time I go through an energy diary, I get people saying "yeah, electric cars just burn oil too because we make electricity from oil." I kind of expect that from casual readers new to the energy debate, but you guys are congressmen for God's sake. Less than 2% of our electricity comes from oil, and that percentage will fall to near zero within the next couple of years with the closing of some old plants in the Northeast. Oil does not equal electricity. Get it? Do you, congressmen? Shouldn't you already know this stuff?
And if that wasn't enough congressional idiocy on a single subject for a single day, they also took the time to shoot down something that might really help.
The committee voted down, 39 to 12, a separate amendment to require the federal government to find a way to cut U.S. oil demand by 1 million barrels a day by 2013. The amendment offered by Democrat Henry Waxman of California aimed to reduce imports of crude oil.
What could be wrong with that? Go out and find a way to reduce our need for imported oil. Isn't that something on which we can all agree? Apparently not.
Lawmakers with automakers in their districts led the fight to defeat Waxman's proposal, arguing it was backdoor way to require U.S. mini-vans, sport utility vehicles and pick-up trucks to improve their fuel efficiency.
The amendment did not mandate any specific action to reduce oil consumption, but supporters said raising vehicle fuel efficiency standards was an option.
Is your skull aching yet? Are you dialing the number for the Canadian embassy? We won't make any effort to reduce oil consumption because it gives us the
option of making more fuel efficient vehicles. God save us from options.
Note that we already consume well above 20 million bbl / day, so trying for a cut of 1 million means making only a 5% cut in the next 8 years. But we can't have that if it threatens the release of the new Ford Gargantuan, Chrylser Brobdingnagian Deluxe, and Chevy Subdivision.
In other news, the new Fortune 500 list came out this week. The largest company in the country was Wal-mart, but they're not the richest. Care to guess what company made more money in one quarter than any other? Care to name the company that made more profit last quarter than any company in the history of mankind? That company, folks, would be Exxon-Mobil.
