Perusing an article in The Detroit News today reporting that Chrysler is pulling out of talks with the fedgov for several billion dollars in new loans to pay for retooling to produce more energy efficient cars. It appears that Chrysler is tired of the fedgovs foot-dragging and haggling over the amount of the loans and will finance the retooling themselves out of their own resources. (Full article here) To which I say: Bravo Chrysler!
It seems that the original loan request (in 2008) was for over $8 billion, and the last number for the loans (from early 2012) was reported in the article to be under $2 billion. The article also mentioned that epic failures of fedgov handouts to companies like Solyndra were a factor in the administrations delays and reductions, especially in an election year. No surprise there!
Then, reading on, I notice that Michigan's own Sen. Debbie Stabenow was quoted from Jan. 2011 saying the projects Chrysler was working on would save 520 million gallons of gasoline between 2011 and 2015. And I got to thinking: How much is 520 million gallons of gasoline? It sounds like an impressive number, but is it really?
Answers.com tells me that the percentage of gasoline that can be extracted from a given volume of crude oil varies based on the amount of sulphur in the oil, but the best case seems to be around 50%, so it takes 2 gallons of crude to make 1 gallon of gasoline. So its 1.04 billion gallons of oil to make that 520 million gallons of gasoline.
So then - how many gallons of crude oil does a tanker hold? Off to Wikipedia for that one. The largest tankers in the world, the TI Class, hold about 130 million gallons of crude. So it's 8 trips of one of those tankers to reach the 1.04 billion gallon mark. Use the largest vessel for the most economic method of transport.
Our friend Democrat Debbie spreads that out over five years, so that's 208 million gallons of crude per year, or less than 2 tankers full of crude oil which would be saved per year by all this federal largesse. 2 Tankers full of oil. 2 tankers. OK - 1.6 tankers, to be precise.
Friends, this is why socialists should never, ever be put in positions of power. Because to support this kind of spending means one of two things, ultimately: either they can't do simple math to find out if something they want to do is economically feasable. Or, they have another agenda in place, to which the economic realities of the universe are secondary. Well, I suppose there could be a third option: they're just stupid.
Hmmm. Wonder which one it might have been here for ol' Democrat Debbie?
Edited to Add a little more math (2/17/12): At the $3.119/gal price I saw on the sign coming in to work today, that would be $1.6 billion in gas saved over 5 years (520 million times 3.119). At $3.50/gal it's $1.8 billion. So the socialists in DC were going to spend anywhere from 2 to 8 billion dollars to save 1.6 to 1.8 billion. You math-whiz types - tell me if this is a good return on investment or not?
No comments:
Post a Comment