Whining and Crying Instead of Innovating

Oil prices shot up today on fears of shortages, leading the US Congress to pass the latest in a series of stupid laws regarding our energy future:

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

It's a nice election-year "are you with us or are you with the oil companies" vote, but it's the complete opposite track of how we should look at the situation.

A substantial amount of the oil in the world has already been pumped out of the ground. What's left is going to be harder and costlier to reach. It's called peak oil, and nobody wants to talk about it, but in all likelihood we're already there. OPEC would be pretty happy getting $130 a barrel for oil if they had excess capacity to pump. I'm not at all sure they do.

But whether they do or not, trying to lower the price of gas on the margins is insufficient to the problem. Iran says a lot of stuff that's not entirely true, but this is an example of what the next steps could be if we invested in innovation.

Researchers at Isfahan University of Technology have invented a car which consumes only a liter of gas to drive up to 500 kilometers.

“The single-person car is capable of driving at a maximum speed of 75 kilometers per hour,” Alireza Fadaei, supervisor of the manufacturer group announced.

“The car has a 3.5 horsepower carburetor and is equipped with an injection engine,” he added.

“Composite materials with fiber-carbon, which form the body of the car, give it low weight and high strength,” the supervisor of the group claims.

The Iranian car, which is scheduled to be exhibited in France's Low Consuming Exhibit in Nogaro, aims to replace motorcycles.

It could replace cars, too. And we could encourage smarter growth and more mass transit and higher efficiency instead of spending time and effort finding out if OPEC is undercutting you on the price. Guess what - they are. They probably always have been. But that tiny amount of extra cash isn't going to do anything to solve long-term energy needs or fight global warming. The Congress is fighting the last war and trying to save their political skins from angry drivers. But this is useless policy.