Video: Auto-mogul-in-chief takes new GM lemon for a spin

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/30/video-auto-mogul-in-chief-takes-new-gm-lemon-for-a-spin/

Redrant: If I wanted a conversion I would build or buy a Ford Ranger electric car conversion and mount a gas or diesel generator in the box. The Ford Ranger conversion is the most popular electric car in the USA costing (new) anywhere between $20K for a 40 mile range and $40K for a 200 miles optimal range. The gas tank is removed and the spacious area under the cargo box is used for high end lead deep-cycle batteries. Far cheaper than lithium. You could mount a diesel or gasoline generator set in the front of the cargo box.

If you look, a lot of work trucks have auxiliary engine on them. If your electric Ranger runs low on juice and you "just happen" to have a genset in the cargo box, Oh! let's say a 25 HP 1800 RPM diesel generator you might figure out some way to plug it into your electric vehicle.

The Ford Ranger/Mazda B pickup (identical except for trim) assembly plant is located a couple of miles from my Minneapolis, MN, USA house so I am very interested in this all. Currently Rangers (Mazdas) have to be sent from the Twin Cities to Ohio where they are converted to battery electric. They sell the engines and such. If Ford could sell them "pre-stripped" this should reduce the price a couple thousand dollars. If the highly capable Ranger assembly plant could make the electric version that would save another couple of thousand.

If the Ford assembly plant could install and integrate the cargo box gensets this would save thousands of dollars more. This could give new life to the Ranger assembly plant (in my neighborhood) now scheduled to close in 2011 new life.

The problem is product liability. Thus the "tragic charade" where the conversion needs to be done piecemeal. For some reason I can't fathom the hybrid, electric, etc cars are designed for those with little if any mechanical knowledge or skills. This is definitely a political decision so the elite can use them and report they "work swell!". Real adaption works best with the "motorheads" who figure out how to make it work.

Anyway, if Ford could assemble a commercial electric with genset Ford Ranger at the Twin Cities plant the plant would be humming years into the future. With removal of legal liabilities this would cost little if anything versus billions for the GM Volt BS.

In case you are wondering about using electric Ford Rangers to avoid paying road taxes my answer is GPS on the generator. You can use untaxed dyed fuel and have GPS calculate static versus moving fuel consumption. There can be a button for non mobile use. This can be audited. Not difficult!

I figure a "good" Ranger" conversion will have a 10KW generator set. Show up in a neighborhood after a storm with a 10K genset, you will be a hero even if the electricity you meter you tell them costs a quarter per kilowatt hour. If you keep AC, washers and dryers off of it this could power square block with essential power. in the middle of writing this I checked godaddy.com and RangerAngels.com was available so I spent $8 registering it.

You Gotta Be Kidding: $GM's Volt > $GM's Cadillac

http://milliondollarway.blogspot.com/2010/07/you-gotta-be-kidding-gms-volt-gms.html

My response posting to this article.

The USA EPA plans to rate this at 100 miles per gallon for CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) calculations according to one claim I have heard. Other stories put the Volt at up to 250 MPG. To comprehend CAFE think of a lot of $20 or $30 USD restaurant tabs and then throw in a few "high roller" $100 to $250 tabs. The "average" goes way up. In the USA, the "big" vehicles tend to garner a premium price and even with all the "tricks" they use more fuel.

Basically on Volt might cover three to five big Caddy "crossover" type vehicles under CAFE. Thus the Volt will cause use of even more fuel!

There is a long history of use of electric vehicles and hybrids. They are usually lithium (like laptops and cellphones) and tend to last eight years. (Regular car batteries are designed around "Cold cranking Amps" not deep cycle. You can buy a "primo" car battery for $200 to $300 versus $50 to $100 for a three to five year car battery).

Actually, it takes relatively little power to propel a medium sized car at say 65MPH. You could drive the Volt Coast to Coast but it might need a few short "rest breaks". with the engine running toi charge up the batteries when going up mountains on the interstates at y65MPH. No big deal.

The grand scheme of the Volt is that you plug it in at night at your home/garage charging station (easy if you have the dedicated parking spot) and "go battery" when you start out. If you do a lot of short trips under ideal conditions this is great. In a perfect world scenario you would drive exactly 40 miles every day, plug it in and then it could recharge at night when electrical demand is low. Workplaces might have charge plugs but electrical demand is highest during "business hours".

As they say with EPA rating, "your mileage will vary and probably be lower". Extreme cold reduces battery output by half (same with your cell in the glove compartment) and you will need to run the engine to provide radiator heat and heated seats. Figure 20 mile battery range and that is on longer trips with hot coolant storage. When it's hot you will like AC, which sucks up a lot of power. Figure 20 mile range here.

Let's do the math here. If you figure you will just make it home 365 days a year and live in and even climate place like Hawaii (ain't many of them) you will get 365x40=14600 miles per year driving without engine fuel. At the 20 mile range scenarios you will get 7300 miles per year. Theoretically, you could do this but this is not driving patterns.

If you discharge the battery and then turn on the small engine this is not efficient. Those home backup generators can cost fifty cents per kilowatt hour to run. Worth it if you have a freezer full of meat and a power outage but pricey. Battery charging is at best 50% efficient, meaning two kilowatt hours in for every kilowatt hours out. It can work when you plug into the grid but pricey with the small on board engine.

Basically, the Volt would be ideal for a person like myself. I live in urban Minneapolis. When I worked nights downtown it was 3.6 miles to work. My (now deceased) parents lived 14 miles away from me. Most other stuff I did in the cities. I could potentially go days or weeks at a time without starting the engine or using fuel, especially if it has a built in 100 volt charger to "top off" when I was at my parents house.

Here is the quandary: When gas wasn't much more than a dollar a gallon (cheap) and I was visiting my parents and commuting to work I drove 6000 miles to work. The Volt looks like a compact to mid-size so I will compare it to the 1986 Toyota 2x4 "stick" four cylinder I was driving then which got 20 to 25 MPG like my current Ford Ranger 4x2 four cylinder "stick". These or a conventional Volt equivalent will use 250 to 300 gallons of gas per year.

Do the math. These are not consuming the fuel.

I will cross post this on my http://fourfiftygas.com

Could 2011 be the Year Without Summer?

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/07/could_2011_be_the_year_without.html

Tom Rowan

It happened in 1816 and is bound to happen again.

In 1816 the northern hemisphere suffered through the year without summer. During the previous winter the Mt Tambora volcano erupted. Thousands froze to death due to the bitter cold the atmospheric ash clouds created.

Frost killed most of the early crops as late as May that year in North America. Frost and snow killed even crops more in June. Riots, arson, and looting flared up in Europe as common food stores became scarce. Lake and river ice were recorded in Pennsylvania in July and August. 1816 also was a year of historic low solar activity as measured by 1816 era telescopes counting sunspots.

Do we have anything like this to fear in 2011? All the stars, including our own, are aligning for a repeat performance by Mother Nature. Consider:

We are currently experiencing another prolonged solar minimum. Even with 21^st century telescopes we can see that the sun is only producing tiny sun specks and weak sunspots.

(READ THE REST AT LINK)

BP Fools the “Socially Responsible” Investors (‘Green’ Enron did too)

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/07/bp-fools-socially-responsible/

by Robert Bradley Jr.
July 20, 2010

“The BP incident highlights big differences in how socially responsible funds prioritize various causes. Some of these managers considered BP’s stance on climate change a strong positive. ‘BP was the first to break the logjam on climate change policy’ and had been a leader on alternative energy, says Mark Regier, director of stewardship investing for MMA Praxis.”

- Quoted in Eleanor Laise, “Oops: ‘Socially Responsible’ Funds Hold Big Stakes of BP,” Wall Street Journal, July 17–18, 2010.

The greenwashing strategy of BP and Enron has been the subject of three recent posts at MasterResource:

They Loved BP and Enron: Climate Alarmism as the Great Environmental Distraction (Part I: Worldwatch Institute quotations)

BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’: Climate Alarmism as the Great Environmental Distraction (Part II: Why the ‘greenwashing’?)

Harvard Business Review Article: BP as Environmental Role Model (Part III on global warming as the great environmental distraction)

Don’t believe that “Beyond Petroleum” BP fooled the politically correct after Enron and even all the way up to the Deepwater Horizon explosion/Gulf spill of May 2010? Then consider the Wall Street Journal’s “Oops: ‘Socially Responsible’ Funds Hold Big Stakes of BP” (reprinted below as Appendix A).

Enron Fooled the “Socially Conscious” Too

Enron also fooled the same “socially responsible” crowd. As I recounted in Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (p. 8):

Enron had been a favorite of the intelligentsia. The New York Times and just about every other media outlet sang its praises. Ken Lay’s company was a champion of all things politically correct. Enron was progressive, practicing “social corporate responsibility” and “stakeholder theory” ….

On the environmental front, Enron practiced “sustainable development” by aggressively investing in politically favored renewable energy and sounding the alarm over man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.

Whether supporting Clinton/Gore’s proposal for a Btu tax; or lobbying the Bush/Cheney administration to regulate CO₂emissions, receiving a “climate protection award” from the EPA, or a “corporate conscience award” from the Council on Economic Priorities; advancing the interventionist agenda of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment; or sponsoring Earth Day events in Texas, California, and Oregon, Ken Lay’s Enron was pointing the way to a sustainable energy future—or so it was thought.

Energy “Social Responsibility”: Two Major Fallacies

Two stubborn premises of ’socially responsible’ energy investing should be revisited at this late date.

The first concerns the green greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), and the second the non-green intermittent resources: wind and solar power.

Carbon Dioxide. The first fallacy is that CO2 is a known, major, reversible negative externality. On the contrary, a balance-of-evidence case can be made that CO2 is the green greenhouse gas as explained by Chip Knappenberger at MasterResource.

To this point, consider the happy intersection between mainstream climate scientist Gerald North of Texas A&M and mainstream economist Robert Mendelsohn of Yale. Realistic anthropogenic warming estimates such as held by Dr. North have strong positives–and even a net benefit after considering costs–for the environment and for the economy as explained by Mendelsohn. This is a strong argument for rejecting a case for ‘market failure’ and government correction, as if there were not government failure and analytic failure also.

There are real pollutants and there are speculative ones. CO2 is a speculative, politicized one. It is time for ’socially conscious’ investors to focus on real environmental issues.

“Green” Renewables. Windpower is the green energy that is not green. Wind environmentalism is an oxymoron; the triumph of image and inertia over reality.

The fatal attraction of environmentalists toward industrial wind turbines (industrial wind parks) has peculiar roots. Left environmentalists like wind not because it is back to nature and benign–it is neitehr of these things. They like wind because it is about the only thing they can offer after (rejected) nuclear or hydro as a ’supply side’ energy source. And the very problems of wind energy–high costs and unreliability–morphs into their demand-side strategy of conservationism. So the Left environmentalists supply-side strategy is really their demand-side strategy–but at the expense of the environment!

Socially conscious investors should turn against wind power and on-grid solar power in particular for the simple fact that the wrong environmental standard has been used. Kent Hawkins has explainedthe dirty secret of intermittent generation as a backdoor pollution source (see Appendix B). And in a more general sense, Peter Huber explains why renewables have severe environmental tradeoffs:

“The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material than must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.”

- Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 105, 108.

Conclusion

The case studies of BP today and Enron yesterday demonstrate the fallacy of using climate alarmism and renewables-based energy transformation as litmus tests for socially responsible energy investing. But will substance overtake form in this area? It is high time for an open, honest debate where the best arguments from both sides are aired for both fund managers and investors to decide.

Appendix A: Eleanor Laise, “Oops: ‘Socially Responsible’ Funds Hold Big Stakes of BP,” Wall Street Journal, July 17–18, 2010.

The oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico has stained some “socially responsible” mutual funds.

These portfolios aim to invest based on environmental, human rights, corporate governance and other criteria. Yet a number of major socially responsible funds and indexes

Workers in Waveland, Miss., clean up oil that washed ashore from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The BP case shows just how different socially responsible portfolios can be. While BP had clear safety issues that alienated some of these funds even before the Gulf spill, others favored the company because of its stance on climate change and alternative energy.

The upshot on socially responsible investing: “Investors need to do more legwork than they might have originally thought when choosing an SRI fund,” says Kathryn Young, mutual fund analyst at investment-research firm Morningstar Inc.

Though still a small corner of the mutual-fund industry, socially responsible funds have attracted steady investor interest in recent years. Shareholders added about $1.4 billion to these funds in the first six months of this year, bringing total assets to more than $50 billion, according to Morningstar.

While the term socially responsible implies major investing restrictions, funds employ a wide range of strategies both to pick stocks and to decide when to sell. Domini Social Investments, which runs Domini Social Equity and other funds, has avoided BP completely. Pax World Funds had flagged BP over safety concerns last year but still held the stock on April 20; it sold a few days later. MMA Praxis Mutual Funds held BP in its International Fund as of June 30, and in a review last month decided not to exclude the stock from its investment universe. (It isn’t clear how many socially responsible funds held BP as of April 20, since mutual funds are required to disclose holdings only on a quarterly basis.)

In the past, many funds followed a fairly simple methodology, screening out companies focused on areas like alcohol, tobacco or weapons. But in recent years, partly to achieve better diversification, some have taken a more nuanced approach. Instead of ruling out entire industries, they may select companies in each sector that have demonstrated some commitment to social principles. Many are even trying to distance themselves from the “SRI” moniker, which some associate with the negative screening approach, in favor of terms like “sustainable” and “environmental, social and governance,” or ESG, investing.

Pax World, for example, a few years ago dropped strict screens that had ruled out gambling and alcohol-related stocks. Now, “we take a best-in-class approach,” rather than focusing on what not to invest in, says Joe Keefe, Pax World president and chief executive. One of the benefits of that approach, he says, is that “you can get broad diversification and exposure to all industries.”

Similarly, Calvert Asset Management Co. in late 2008 launched a new category of funds that use limited screening but focus more on engaging with company management to push for changes. And that is how it wound up holding BP. While the oil giant didn’t pass the screens employed by Calvert’s traditional socially responsible funds, it was held in the engagement-focused Calvert Large Cap Value Fund. That fund liquidated its BP holdings in late June, says Bennett Freeman, senior vice president for sustainability research and policy. “Engagement often takes a long time to demonstrate tangible results,” Mr. Freeman says.

Why soften the investing parameters? To track the broader market more closely. In the 10 years ending June 30, the average socially responsible fund gained an average of 0.1% annually, versus a 1.59% annualized loss for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In the first six months of this year, socially responsible funds fell 6.2%, versus a 6.7% decline for the S&P 500.

But the BP incident highlights big differences in how socially responsible funds prioritize various causes. Some of these managers considered BP’s stance on climate change a strong positive. “BP was the first to break the logjam on climate change policy” and had been a leader on alternative energy, says Mark Regier, director of stewardship investing for MMA Praxis.

Other managers focused on safety and already were backing away from the stock before the spill. Pax World, which put BP on a watch list in October 2009 due to safety concerns, launched a full review of the company earlier this year. BP failed, though Pax World still held the stock at the time of the spill. Even so, “our process was working,” Pax World’s Mr. Keefe says.

Even broad socially responsible indexes disagree on how to handle BP. The stock was removed from two KLD Research & Analytics indexes, now owned by MSCI, in 2007 and 2008. The Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes dropped BP after the spill, on May 31. Yet another index lineup, FTSE4Good, still includes BP. Index components are reviewed on a semiannual basis, and the next review will be in September, says Jill Mathers, a spokeswoman for FTSE Group.

Investors with deeply held convictions about a particular social or environmental issue would be wise to delve deeply into a fund’s holdings before taking the plunge. Says Adam Kanzer, managing director and general counsel at Domini: “No two are exactly alike.

Wall Street Journal: Why Is the Gulf Cleanup So Slow?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703426004575339650877298556.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion

Redrant: Another example not mentioned in the article is the tendency of bureaucrats to "cover their behinds" by strictly enforcing rules like the "oil in water discharge" rule. For now the collected oil and water discharge mix has to collected and sent to a refinery. A skinner/separator might get out 95% or more of the oil. Basically what is discharged is very light and will tend to evaporate easily. Not good in aquifers that supply drinking waters but this is the ocean.

A presidential "Executive order" to waive the rule in the this oil spill would solve this problem. I recall after Hurricane Katrina and when gas price shot was up President GW Bush signed an executive order relaxing the "boutique blend" rules for gasoline. Obama says he will "kick some asses". This is not an "executive decision". We elect presidents to make these heading the largest corporation in the world. Greg Lang

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/nation/Once-a-government-pet-BP-now-a-capitalist-tool-95942659.html

Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool

By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
June 9, 2010

In this May 30, 2010 file photo, BP PLC CEO Tony Hayward talks to reporters as he visits a Coast Guard command center in Venice, La. BP's inability to contain the worst oil spill in U.S. history has focused attention on CEO Tony Hayward's words and deeds over the past six weeks - and the scrutiny has not yielded a flattering image. (AP file photo)

As BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig was sinking on April 22, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was on the phone with allies in his push for climate legislation, telling them he would soon roll out the Senate climate bill with the support of the utility industry and three oil companies — including BP, according to the Washington Post.

Kerry never got to have his photo op with BP chief executive Tony Hayward and other regulation-friendly corporate chieftains. Within days, Republican co-sponsor Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., repudiated the bill following a spat about immigration, and Democrats went back to the drawing board.

But the Kerry-BP alliance for an energy bill that included a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases pokes a hole in a favorite claim of President Obama and his allies in the media — that BP’s lobbyists have fought fiercely to be left alone. Lobbying records show that BP is no free-market crusader, but instead a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.

While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.

Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.

As Democrats fight to advance climate change policies, they are resorting to the misleading tactics they used in their health care and finance efforts: posing as the scourges of the special interests and tarring “reform” opponents as the stooges of big business.

Expect BP to be public enemy No. 1 in the climate debate.

There’s a problem: BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobby dedicated to passing a cap-and-trade bill. As the nation’s largest producer of natural gas, BP saw many ways to profit from climate legislation, notably by persuading Congress to provide subsidies to coal-fired power plants that switched to gas.

In February, BP quit USCAP without giving much of a reason beyond saying the company could lobby more effectively on its own than in a coalition that is increasingly dominated by power companies. Theymade out particularly well in the House’s climate bill, while natural gas producers suffered.

But two months later, BP signed off on Kerry’s Senate climate bill, which was hardly a capitalist concoction. One provision BP explicitly backed, according to Congressional Quarterly and other media reports: a higher gas tax. The money would be earmarked for building more highways, thus inducing more driving and more gasoline consumption.

Elsewhere in the green arena, BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels and solar energy, two products that cannot break even without government support. Lobbying records show the company backing solar subsidies including federal funding for solar research. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, is currently financing a BP solar energy project in Argentina.

Ex-Im has also put up taxpayer cash to finance construction of the 1,094-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline carrying oil from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, Turkey—again, profiting BP.

Lobbying records also show BP lobbying on Obama’s stimulus bill and Bush’s Wall Street bailout. You can guess the oil giant wasn’t in league with the Cato Institute or Ron Paul on those.

BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans. It employs the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, Obama’s transition director and confidant. Other BP troops on K Street include Michael Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale; Steven Champlin, former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus; and Matthew LaRocco, who worked in Bill Clinton’s Interior Department and whose father was a Democratic congressman. Former Republican staffers, such as Reagan alumnus Ken Duberstein, also lobby for BP, but there’s no truth to Democratic portrayals of the oil company as
an arm of the GOP.

Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand.

Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool.

Timothy P. Carney is The Washington Examiner's lobbying editor. His K Street column appears on Wednesdays.

Follow Timothy P. Carney on Twitter

NY Post: $7-a-gallon gas?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/gallon_gas_9GlF3o1xIcIBelOV3k0RsK

$7-a-gallon gas?

By BEN LIEBERMAN

Last Updated: 2:49 PM, June 18, 2010

Posted: 12:02 AM, June 18, 2010

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.

That's a Harvard University study's estimate of the per-gallon price of the president's global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.

So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?

Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.

The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste -- and what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."

That sure was true of global-warming policy, and especially the cap-and-trade bill. Many observers thought the measure, introduced last year in the House by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was dead: The American people didn't seem to think that the so-called global-warming crisis justified a price-hiking, job-killing, economy-crushing redesign of our energy supply amid a fragile recovery. Passing another major piece of legislation, one every bit as unpopular as ObamaCare, appeared unlikely in an election year.

So Obama and congressional proponents of cap-and-trade spent several months rebranding it -- downplaying the global-warming rationale and claiming that it was really a jobs bill (the so-called green jobs were supposed to spring from the new clean-energy economy) and an energy-independence bill (that will somehow stick it to OPEC).

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) even reportedly declined to introduce their new cap-and-trade proposal in the Senate on Earth Day, because they wanted to de-emphasize the global-warming message. Instead, Kerry called the American Power Act "a plan that creates jobs and sets us on a course toward energy independence and economic resurgence."

But the new marketing strategy wasn't working. Few believe the green-jobs hype -- with good reason. In Spain, for example, green jobs have been an expensive bust, with each position created requiring, on average, $774,000 in government subsidies. And the logic of getting us off oil imports via a unilateral measure that punishes American coal, oil and natural gas never made any sense at all.

Now the president is repackaging cap-and-trade -- again -- as a long-term solution to the oil spill. But it's the same old agenda, a huge energy tax that will raise the cost of gasoline and electricity high enough so that we're forced to use less.

The logic linking cap-and-trade to the spill in the Gulf should frighten anyone who owns a car or truck. Such measures force up the price at the pump -- Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs thinks it "may require gas prices greater than $7 a gallon by 2020" to meet Obama's stated goal of reducing emissions 14 percent from the transportation sector.

Of course, doing so would reduce gasoline use and also raise market share for hugely expensive alternative fuels and vehicles that could never compete otherwise. Less gasoline demand means less need for drilling and thus a slightly reduced chance of a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon spill -- but only slightly. Oil will still be a vital part of America's energy mix.

Oil-spill risks should be addressed directly -- such as finding out why the leak occurred and requiring new preventive measures or preparing an improved cleanup plan for the next incident. Cap-and-trade is no fix and would cause trillions of dollars in collateral economic damage along the way.

Emanuel was wrong. The administration shouldn't view each crisis -- including the oil spill -- as an opportunity to be exploited, but as a problem to be addressed. And America can't afford $7-a-gallon gas.

Ben Lieberman is senior analyst of energy and environmental policy in The Heritage Founda tion's Roe Institute.