Ugh. Just read an article over at nytimes.com ( this one ) about the upcoming energy/oil crunch. Bush actually came out and said if we can avoid going "on a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful."
First, this is an about face on his policy of not asking the US to conserve more. His stance has always been keep using what we're using, my buddies in the oil industry will make more. Now there is legislation in Congress about relaxing the current environmental restrictions to boost production. This would allow companies to build off-shore oil platforms in places that were banned for environmental reasons and allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An interesting set off restriction liftings since none of this will help people with their gas bills this winter!
Secondly for the president to come out and be the one telling us to not drive so much looks ridiculous. Maybe I am underestimating the impact of oil disruption that happened because of Katrina and Rita. Maybe I just think the man is ridiculous and ANYTHING that comes out of his mouth is a crock of shit. It seems to me that if he truly thinks we should be worried he should have an energy secratery up on the podium talking about ways to conserve. Then he would have the time to introduce some legislation that encourages conservation instead of opening up more of our pristine wilderness to oil drilling. Or god forbid encourage oil companies (or ANY companies) to look into alternative energy sources.
I've seen a lot of ads from GE lately about wind and solar and even clean coal research. I believe GE has more wind power in Europe than anyone and Europe using a LOT of wind power. What is it going to take for Americans to realize we need to invest in this stuff, bigtime and right now!
A little more description of what is going on in the second tutorial and some cleaned up formatting hit the tutorial page. Look for version 0.3 of the tutorial tomorrow and some clarification of things in the rest of the tutorial (namely some things I said I would look into).
As a side note, I'm trying to find a new layout for the tutorial page because I find it hard to read like it is. (in fact I'm working on a[nother] complete site revision as I have some other content in mind that doesn't fit well into this design) - stay tuned.
