Some folks birtch about SUVs and waste. But you must realize that gas guzzlers are big, powerful, and sexy. I love the Hummer2. I know people who drive them and use them primarily as on-the-road offices for which they were not designed, but, hey, they look damned good. All the people I know who drive monsters, are lawyers. They know what looks good and forms a safe shield for them in traffic.

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Most of the world's crises can be tracked back to the fact that WE HAVE TOO MANY LAWYERS.
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Without women, money would have no meaning......Aristotle Onassis.

What looks good is a matter of opinion. My son would agree with you, I think they're ugly as sin.

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"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you." -- Billy Wilder

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied." -- Otto Von Bismark

None of my information comes from Silent Spring. I can cite many sources to back up my statements.

The amount of DDT used per acre on cotton was about as much as it would take to treat more than 1000 thousand homes against a public health campaign against blood born disease.

The EPA states:
I could cite more, but I don't think that is required in this case.

Now, how about citing some sources that state that insects develop no tolerance to DDT, and then cite the sources of your claim of a ban on use of DDT for public health purposes in the US or worldwide.

So, the reason the US is importing so much oil and is so subject to the world wide price and supply is because the cost of producing more oil in the US is too much higher than elsewhere in the world, and not because the environmentalists have been successful in requiring that they meet rather modest environmental standards. The oil industry has demonstrated that they aren't able to meet those requirements in Alaska already. Plus, they have production rights for a sizable field in Alaska already, but they find the cost of extraction there too high, so pointing to Alaska on environmental issues is a convenient way of diverting attention away from the oil industry's efforts to get governments to build the new pipelines.

Look, we are talking about corporations with massive "market caps" in their stocks, and with huge profit margins and huge multibillion dollar after tax profits. If they thought something were profitable, they would have no problem raising money for the capital investment. The most obvious way, and the point at one time the purpose of the corporate stock market, is to sell stock. That gives them the case to invest in capital assets without any cost to the corporation in terms of interest payments. If the return on invested capital is a fair one, then the stock price would not be affected.

Of course, the real incentives for the oil companies is for the price of oil to keep increasing, and the best way to accomplish that is to make sure that you control who brings which oil field into production. And that is being done by "research and development" projects with the Federal government, as well as focusing a lot of effort into getting favorable lease terms, based on the premise that these projects are "too risky."

Another example of the unwillingness of industry to invest in capital if there is any risk is in electric power generation. A conservative Republican Congress passed laws that allows a consortium of power transmission operators to assess consumers fees on their power use that will be set aside to fund capital investments in new power plants, if and when someone decides to actually build one. Well, not someone, because neither you nor I would be allowed to use this money to build a power plant, only the corporations part of the consortium given the power to force you and I to put money in a piggy bank for later construction of capital equipment which we will again pay a return on the invested capital.

So, why is private enterprise better? Because it never takes risks?

And so the MBA president Bush and his conservative Republican administration and conservative Republican Congress has been serving private enterprise well by taking the risks out of many preferred industries. I might have not have contempt for conservative Republicans if they didn't say they are for "free market capitalism" when they don't believe in the "free market" nor in real "capitalism," the idea that private capital provides a benefit to both the individual saver, who places his saving at risk, and to society. But I don't expect to see a Republican proclaim of a bill, "this legislation corrects failures in free market capitalism where corporations won't take risks and the free market places the income of US corporate CEOs at risk."

What’s Seabrook?

So PSNH is privately owned company that has been granted monopoly status by the state of New Hampshire is that correct?

Why can't we go to the colorado mountains where there is 200 trillion tons of oil and use it ?

I'll add this to the mix Scott...Let's see what happens.


The U.S. Govt's
Secret Colorado
Oil Discovery

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains
lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world — more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. Three companies have been chosen to lead the way. Test drilling has already begun...



Northwestern Colorado. August 2005.

The U.S. Energy Department announces the results of a land survey...

It was conducted to determine the official amount of oil a thousand feet deep in the Rocky Mountains...

They reported this stunning news:

We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth.

Here are the official estimates:

• 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
• 18-times as much oil as Iraq
• 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
• 22-times as much oil as Iran
• 500-times as much oil as Yemen

...And it's all right here in the Western United States.

James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says, "We've got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East."

More than 2 TRILLION barrels. Untapped.

"That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today," reports The Denver Post.

When asked about America's least-publicized oil supply, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch said:

"The amounts of oil are staggering. Who would have guessed that in just Colorado and Utah, there is more recoverable oil than in the Middle East?"

Here's the kicker...

The U.S. government already owns the land. It's been right there under our noses the whole time.

In fact, the government's appointed a small group of companies to lead the way to the oil.

Test drilling has already begun.

And the profit forecasts are ridiculous. According to the RAND Corporation (a public-policy think tank for the government), this small region could produce:

Three million barrels of oil per day... That translates into more than $20 BILLION a year.

These are the conservative estimates. The U.S. Energy Dept. estimates an eventual output of 10 million barrels of oil per day. At that rate, the money flow would be even greater.

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A Liberal is a Man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel (Robert Frost 1874-1963).

Seabrook is perhaps the nuclear power plant that defined the dismal economics of nuclear power generation. Only one nuclear power plant came online after Seabrook, other than an additional reactor at the TVA that is a key partner with the DOE's nuclear weapons work.

PSNH was the private corporation that was the regulated monopoly supplying electric power to 80% of NH by area and about 90% of the people. The stockholders of PSNH lost everything in the bankruptcy brought on by Seabrook. As part of the bankruptcy, PSNH sold its share of Seabrook at a huge loss from book value.

Seabrook was sold a second time in 2002:
"[T]he Florida based company, [FPL,] now operates 30 hydro-electric plants in Maine, fossil fuel plants there and in Massachusetts, and a gas fired power plant, scheduled for completion in Rhode Island this summer. It also operates four nuclear reactors in its home state, twin reactors at both Turkey Point and St. Lucie, Florida. The Seabrook purchase, at a total of $836 million dollars, Hay conceded, was at the high end of nuclear plant asset values." [Only about 87% was actually purchased; the remainder is owned by three Mass. city utilities. But that puts the plant value at about $1B]

The rate payers, however, have been and are still paying over $2B in "stranded costs."

So, we are paying for the nuclear power multiple times. We're paying for the power generation by the current owner. We are paying to dispose of the fuel. We are paying to decommission the plant. We are paying about half the cost of building the plant to the utility that bought the bankrupt PSNH and that now only transmits the power.

Of course, this wasn't the worst of the nuclear power plant disasters. The plant on Long Island was constructed and started at low power in order to contaminate everything, and was then abandoned. For that one, the rate payers are paying $6B in "stranded costs" plus paying decommissioning fees in order to dismantle and properly dispose of radioactive nuclear waste.

Someone observed that the problem with the current nuclear power plant design is that it is too massive to mass produce. The better solution would be to create stationary versions of the nuclear power plants used in nuclear submarines or aircraft carriers. Those would be manufactured by the thousands, so they would benefit from technology improvements.

But that isn't going to happen. The only way that nuclear power plants get built will be if the government subsidizes them so that banks and Walls Street and bond market takes no risk.

You left out the part that always comes with that article, how to get in on the secret deals with will make you rich.

Personally I think the "letters" that are in all CAPITAL LETTERS ADVISING OF MONEY NEEDING TO BE TRANSFERRED INTO MY ACCOUNT are more believable than articles like the above.