The Gauntlet of Rudi Giuliani! (Plus conspiracy theories about gas prices)

also I believe Oregon, New Mexico and Washington all went for Gore
Yes, they did go Gore.
Question is, if they had gone Bush, would they have had lower gas prices?

No need to get violently angry. This is all conjecture.
Also, sorry about Tennessee, I was typing quickly.

moneybox
Pay at the Pump
Who's profiting off high gas prices? Not the owner of the Kwik-E-Mart.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, May 14, 2004, at 1:05 PM PT

The average retail price for unleaded gasoline in the United States on May 10 was $1.94 per gallon, up 45 cents from a year ago. With oil pushing $41 a barrel, prices are likely to rise further. And the more people spend on gas, the less they have to spend on everything else. Wal-Mart's CEO expressed concern Thursday that high gas prices "are taking more than somewhere around $7 a week out of our average customer's spendable income."

The companies that produce and sell oil are the beneficiaries of the squeeze. But not everybody in the gas business profits from rising prices. Drivers aren't the only victims when gas placards hit $2 a gallon. Equally hurt are the people who sell three quarters of the gas consumed in this country: convenience store owners. (If you're a gas station with a significant retail presence, you're a convenience store, whether you're an Exxon, Mobil, or Wawa. Stations that have gas pumps—and only gas pumps—aren't included.)

How do these unfortunate entrepreneurs get nailed by rising prices at the pump? Profit margins for gas, which are already slim, tend to shrink when prices rise. In 2003, convenience store owners reported an 8.8 percent mark-up* on gas, meaning if gas cost them $1.00 per gallon, they could sell it for $1.088. That's the lowest mark-up since 1985, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Add in credit-card fees—typically 3 percent—and the cost of distribution, which ranges between 2 and 4 percent, and the margins for gas are razor-thin, at the most a couple of pennies on the dollar.

And if you have to eat price increases, your margin slips further. That's what happens when gas prices rise. Convenience store owners buy gas every day or once every couple of days, and they constantly adjust their prices. But as this Energy Department report shows, it takes about 10 weeks for a change in the spot price of oil to filter fully into the retail price of gas, with about half the change working its way in within two weeks. This lag is a boon for convenience store owners when gas prices are plummeting: The price they pay to fill up their tanks falls rapidly, while the price they charge falls more slowly. But it's poison when prices are rising. Each day they pay more to fill up their tanks, but they're unable fully to pass on the hikes to their customers.

Gas-station owners take their time boosting prices—and lower their profit margins—because the gas market is both highly transparent and highly competitive. (How many businesses display their prices so prominently and publicly?) Owners frequently set their prices based as much on what the guy across the street does as on the price they pay to fill up their tanks. Many gas stations are engaged in a daily game of chicken with their competitors. And because of Internet sites like Gasbuddy.com, drivers can now check out prices before they leave home and plot their routes accordingly.

Rising gas prices hurt profits inside the convenience store as well as at the pump. When drivers spend more on gas, they're likely to spend less on Twinkies and Marlboro Lights. That's bad news for store owners, because the real money lies in junk food and coffee. Convenience stores owners mark up gas by an average of 8.8 percent, but the margins on potato chips, beef jerky, and those awful cheese-filled hot dogs is 30.8 percent. For the $337 billion convenience store industry, as NACS reported, fuel accounted for 65.5 percent of total sales last year but just 35.2 percent of gross margin. In other words, gas accounts for two-thirds of the sales but only one-third of the profits.

Finally, when prices rise, many gasoline retailers fall victim to a form of road rage: Drivers steal more gas.

It's difficult to feel too much pity for convenience store owners. After all, they make a living selling us addictive goods that aren't particularly good for us: gas, cigarettes, Hostess Sno Balls, and tabloid newspapers. But as you mutter under your breath in disbelief as you shell out $30 to fill up your Jeep, pause to consider the shrinking margins of the convenience store owner. He's feeling your pain.

Correction, May 17, 2004: The article originally described the difference between what convenience stores pay for gas and what they charge for it as an 8.8 percent "margin." That 8.8 percent difference is actually the "mark-up," not the "margin." Return to the corrected sentence.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at [email protected].

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2100546/

regarding topic #1: Somewhere between B and C. The families are entitled to feel some anger for losing loved ones .. But a more objective opinion would say (C) that the NYC leadership did the best they could, and certainly wanted to do the right thing in every case. It's ludicrous to think that anyone (other than the hijackers) meant to do anything harmful or even negligent...

xpost

Leaders are expected to anticipate problems as well as react to them. Giuliani spent too much time crowing about elephant dung, the juvenile records of murdered people, and his wife to be an anticipatory leader.

And because of Internet sites like Gasbuddy.com, drivers can now check out prices before they leave home and plot their routes accordingly.
Hmmm. Learn something new and interesting every day. Viva la internet.

http://www.rhodeislandgasprices.com/

the lowest gas price is at the NAVAL WAR COLLEGE!!!

.. I agree. I'm looking only at "supposed lack of leadership during the WTC attacks" - as the question asks. That the city may have been unprepared in certain respects is completely fair to say.. But once the event happened, the response was appropriate.. no?

xpost ..

(and THEN we all get out our political voting habit maps and play the worlds most depressing game of Stratego.)
(xpost x3)

sure it was appropriate, but what else were they gonna do? Rudy may be a jackass, but he's not that much of one. If we're gonna just study what happened on that day and not the factors that could've either mitigated or alleviated it, well we're not learning anything of use.

..that said, I was never really a propoponent of Rudy G.. especially after the modern art flap ...

except for Richard Clarke?

also, for full disclosure, I'm making this up as I go along.. I may be completely ignorant of some really compelling information ...

A lot of factors are involved, including:

1) State (and sometimes locality) taxes.
2) Transporting the fuel from the refinery to the retailer. (Alaska has oil but no refineries; retail gas prices these reflect the effort necessary to transport it back from the lower 48.)
3) State- or region-specific blends that are intended to be optimized to local weather conditions and minimize emissions.

While I do have my suspicions, given the administration's ties to the oil industry, these factors do play a role in retail gas prices. Still, I wouldn't put it past the president to pull off an October Surprise of some sort.

NEWS & COLUMNS
Rudy on the Spot

By Christopher Brodeur

RUDY ON THE SPOT On the occasion of the 9/11 Commission's New York visit on May 18 and 19, some suggested questions for Rudy Giuliani:

• Why were the roof doors of the WTC locked on 9/11? Did this not come up in your "drills"? Were you aware that helicopters rescued many in the 1993 WTC bombing?

• 7 WTC collapsed because of the illegal fuel tanks in the building's lobby. Who approved their placement?

• You melted down much of the structural steel taken from the biggest crime scene in U.S. history, then said no one told you to keep the evidence. But both engineering groups and victims' families told FEMA and Congress otherwise. Can you explain this?

• Considering that you arrived into office shortly after the 1993 WTC attack, why didn't you request firefighting helicopters? Were you aware that airports use foam to extinguish jet fuel blazes, and that California uses helicopters to fight forest fires?

• By most accounts, the Emergency Management Center had a state-of-the-art headquarters safely in the basement of One Police Plaza, yet you moved it to a private building owned by perhaps your largest campaign contributor, Larry Silverstein, at taxpayer expense. Why did you move the bunker to a site that had already been bombed, and was widely believed to be a future target?

• Why did you claim in your book that the firemen's radios worked and that they stayed to die by choice, when many firemen had already testified that their radios failed? Do you think the firemen are all lying about their radios not working? Did you know they also failed in 1993?

• You returned a $10 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal because he said, "America should reexamine its foreign policy." Cardinal Egan said the same thing and you were silent. Can you explain this? And why don't you owe the victims' families that money you forfeited?

• It's been well-established that on the morning of 9/11, there was no organization of rescue teams. Why did the fire department not get the police department's warnings that the towers were going to fall? Why did your "emergency management team" never get these two crucial departments to work together, eight years after the 1993 bombing?

• How often did you communicate with the FBI and CIA on terror pre-9/11? Knowing that the terrorists still wanted to raze the towers—as they admitted during their trial—did you consider all possible ways to topple the buildings? Were you aware that a Port Authority employee testified after the 1993 bombing that there should be a plan to prevent, or at least deal with, a civilian jet attack?

• You have repeatedly said the terrorists attacked because "they hate America's freedom." Have you never heard them claim that America's policies in the Middle East are the real motive? Can you provide a single statement by any terrorist organization that mentions our freedom, or did you just make this up?

except for Richard Clarke?

or John O'Neill, or Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, or anyone else paying a lot of attention to the issue

(Wondered why my ass hurt, now i know)

I think California has a very high state tax on gasoline.

The prices are around $1.91 a gallon in Kentucky, but this state has rather low taxes (for now) on gasoline, booze and cigs.

Case in point: Shell Oil is shutting down a Bakersfield refinery that supplies 2% of California's gasoline. Why? Because they can...

The conspiracy theorists must be assuming that the oil companies and gasoline distributors are sticking it to the blue states because they favor Bush & Co. But I suspect that lower state gas taxes in the red states are at least partly responsible for any differentials. (This assumes that this differential actually exists. Has anyone done any careful state-by-state comparisons?)

Also, don't forget that multiple companies, all of which are competitors, supply the U.S. Even if every single company's management favors Bush, presumably some of these companies would be breaking ranks, because offering lower-priced gas would attract more customers.

that may be true in various policy areas (giving North Dakota $40 a person for "anti-terror," for example), but I'd like to see you prove there's any connection between red state voting patterns and gas prices.

I'm not suggesting that the Bush administration is doing something to affect gas prices in red states only (though it's possible that they're doing something that affects all states, but red states disproportionately; I don't think that's likely either).

Today, Americans are panicky over the impact of a $40 barrel of oil. In his new book, Stephen Leeb predicts, "Oil prices are likely to rise to triple-digit territory—$100 a barrel at a minimum, and probably higher—by the end of the decade and possibly sooner." He sees the high, unstable price of energy wreaking havoc. [ie. gas prices will go up for red states too]

"Inflation and deflation will seesaw back and forth in chaotic fashion, with inflation generally ascendant but not always."

Economic growth, as we have come to know it, is entirely dependent on a vast, continuous flow of remarkably cheap oil. As Simmons says, "Peak does not mean oil has run dry, it does mean that growth is over. Who would like to get on the plane and go tell India and China, sorry guys, your spurt is over. We used your energy."

"I have studied the depletion issue intensely for too long now to have any remaining doubts about the severity of the issue," Simmons says. "Not a soul has been able to produce evidence that the depletion issue is not real, nor have I had anyone at any time lay out a credible way that the world could actually add so much supply within such a short period of time. Sadly, there is no factual data to support the 'sense' that the world will be awash in cheap oil and gas forever."

Likewise, the U.S. economy has in the past been protected from the impact of energy price increases because energy costs have been so low and such a small percentage of total economic activity. According to Stephen Leeb, those days are coming to an end. "If the price of energy is only five percent of the total economy then increases aren't so important. When energy costs become 10 percent of the economy, that's significant. We're at about eight percent right now. That's very close to the tipping point."

When the tipping point comes, Americans will be compelled to live very differently than they do today. One leading American social critic, James Howard Kunstler, sees serious political and cultural turmoil up ahead as the way of life Americans have built over the last 60 years begins to break down. With decreasing access to cheap oil, Kunstler sees the fundamentals of industrial agriculture, manufacturing and retail trade changing significantly.

"The whole Archer Daniels Midland model of turning oil into corn into Taco Bell—that whole complex, that system, is really going to be over," says Kuntsler. "We're going to be forced to grow more of our food locally and return to a kind of agriculture that really hasn't been practiced here in a long time. A lot of the land that has only had value as suburban development in the past 30 or 40 years is going to have to be reassigned."

Likewise, Kunstler foresees "the demise of Wal-Mart style, big box, national chains." Companies whose profit margins depend on "merchandise made by factories 12,000 miles away" simply won't function in a world of $100-plus barrels of oil. "We're going to have to seriously reorganize our whole system of retail trade and economy."

Along with many scientists, Kunstler believes George Bush's "hydrogen economy" rhetoric is a "fantasy" and a stall tactic to avoid making immediate changes. "It's kind of a cruel hoax as far as the public is concerned because it raises expectations that we're going to be able to continue living this way, and we're not."

As the changes come down upon us, Americans may have a difficult time understanding what is happening and why. As we're already seeing in this year's simplistic and demagogic presidential- campaign discussion of gas prices, political leaders may find it easier to focus more on whom to blame rather than how to come together to address the fundamental problem.

"Many Americans will draw the conclusion that they're being somehow cheated by the oil companies or that there's some kind of corporate conspiracy that's causing all this trouble and they're going to militate to do something about it and, of course, that won't really be the problem. The problem is geological—about what's in the ground and where it's at and how much of it there is. I think that we'll elect maniacs to try to turn back the clock and bring back the 1990s," Kunstler says.

choice quotes:

Such technical obstacles, described in great detail in Romm's flatly written book, have turned him into a hydrogen realist. He considers, for instance, all the different methods of distributing hydrogen around the country for use by drivers of Bush's FreedomCar. Suppose you load compressed hydrogen into canisters and put them on the back of tractor trailers: you will need fifteen of these trucks to serve the same number of vehicles as one gasoline tanker does today, and if on average they're traveling three hundred miles, they're using 40 percent of all the energy they deliver just to transport it. Suppose you decide instead to produce the hydrogen at filling stations with small steam methane reformers. A recent study by Argonne National Laboratory, making fairly optimistic technical predictions, found that building the necessary infrastructure to service 40 percent of American vehicles by this method would exceed $600 billion.

But here's the really startling piece of news that emerges from Romm's book: if you worry about global warming, that investment won't necessarily get you much. For the last couple of years I've driven a hybrid-electric Honda Civic which has a gasoline engine and also a self-recharging electric motor to augment power. It works exactly like a normal vehicle, goes eighty miles per hour on the highway, drives easily up any hill, and gets fifty miles to the gallon without any of the problems of cost, technology, or infrastructure that hydrogen presents. Even if we manage to solve the huge number of difficulties that Romm invokes, in the end the hydrogen car that results will almost certainly use natural gas as the feedstock for obtaining hydrogen. It will produce about as much carbon per mile as my Honda Civic (which, in turn, should only get better with fifteen years of tinkering). Even diesel engines, which are as old-fashioned as automotive technology gets, may provide comparable reductions for far less money. Romm concludes:

Hydrogen vehicles are unlikely to achieve even a five percent market penetration by 2030.... Neither government policy nor business investment should be based on the belief that hydrogen cars will have meaningful commercial success in the near- or medium term.

For now, at least, the smart money seems to agree. Ballard's share price has fallen from a high of $140 to as low as $6, and 25 percent of its workforce has been laid off. Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Oil, quotes a hydrogen engineer:

I'm afraid that when we finally get people to stop associating hydrogen with bombs and the Hindenburg explosion, the next word they'll think of will be "scam."

June 1, 2004
With Gas Prices Already High, Europe Is Less Rattled by Jump
By MARK LANDLER

FRANKFURT, May 31 - Alexandra Krauter paid little attention as the digits on the gasoline pump flashed upward. Ms. Krauter, a 29-year-old woman who works in a Frankfurt restaurant, was not even sure how much she was paying (1.15 euros a liter, or the equivalent of $5.31 a gallon).

"I don't think the price is appropriate, but I don't care that much about gas prices," Ms. Krauter, as she waited restlessly beside her pint-size Fiat. "I've got other things to worry about."

Few Europeans are as nonchalant about the high cost of fuel as Ms. Krauter. But her attitude gets at a basic difference in the way Europeans and Americans view the current spike in the price of oil.

While the arrival of $2 a gallon gasoline has rattled many Americans - reviving memories of the oil shocks of the 1970's - Europeans have reacted with relative equanimity. Gas is so heavily taxed in most European countries that a jump in the market price is less noticeable here. And the recent strength of the euro versus the dollar has insulated consumers.

Moreover, Europe, after three decades of seeking alternatives to oil, is somewhat less vulnerable to the effects of higher crude prices. Oil and natural gas still lubricate Europe's economy, to be sure, and industrial countries like Germany remain among the world's largest importers.

But for a variety of reasons - ranging from smaller cars and shorter commutes to the windmills that dot the countryside from Denmark to Spain - Europe does not view $40-a-barrel oil with the same alarm. Indeed, some here see it as a chance to redouble Europe's campaign to wean itself from fossil fuels.

"We talked about high oil prices in the past, but it was hypothetical," said Peter Ahmels, the president of Germany's Federal Association on Wind Energy. "Now people are asking, 'Could the oil supply run out?' "

In 2000, a rise in the price of fuel was compounded by higher taxes, which ignited protests and blockades by truckers from Britain to Germany. This time, officials here hope, the high prices will rekindle an appreciation for windmills, solar panels and other alternative energy sources.

Germany is the world's largest producer of wind energy, with 15,800 turbines generating 15,000 megawatts of electricity, or 6 percent of its total supply. But parts of the country, notably Bavaria, have been loath to build windmills because of complaints that they blight the landscape.

Now, with higher oil prices, those objections may lose some force. "It's one very strong point for us," Mr. Ahmels said.

With a renewed commitment, he said he thinks Germany could nearly double its wind generation capacity by 2010. And the development of offshore windmill farms could eventually enable wind to account for 15 percent of Germany's electricity supply, despite the country's relatively meager coastline.

Solar energy is also growing, with the production of solar cells almost doubling last year. The German solar power industry, which is subsidized by the government, will generate more than 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) in revenue in 2004, according to an industry group.

Europe's push for renewable energy began as a response to the 1970's oil shock, which was as traumatic here as in the United States. Over the years, however, the campaign for clean energy has been driven less by fears of dwindling oil than a desire to protect the environment.

In Germany, the Green Party, far from being a lobbying group on the sidelines, is part of the government. Germans accept, as environmental imperative, things that Americans would find bizarre - like sorting household garbage into four separate bins for recycling, or paying 70 cents of every euro at the pump in the form of taxes, to drive down fuel consumption.

"It is a Green position to force an energy policy which reduces our dependency on oil," said Rezzo Schlauch, a Green Party member who is state secretary in the ministry of economics and labor.

Mr. Schlauch said that high oil prices are helpful insofar as they give new impetus to such policies. He noted that there would be a major conference on renewable energy in Bonn, starting on Tuesday.

For all the talk of living with less oil, there is evidence that Europe could use a kick. The European Union set a target of producing 22 percent of its electricity, and 12 percent of all energy, through renewable sources by 2010. Now, though, Brussels admits that it will miss the target unless its member countries increase subsidies and other forms of aid for the industry.

Without more support, the commission said, renewable energy will account for only 10 percent of total energy production by 2010. It currently accounts for 6 percent, compared to 40 percent for oil, 23 percent for natural gas, 16 percent for nuclear power, and 15 percent for solid fuels.

While wind energy is growing in Germany and Denmark, it has been hobbled in France because the electric utility does not want other energy companies using its power grid. In Britain, until recently, builders of windmills could not obtain permits from local authorities to erect turbines.

A long-term increase in oil prices could sweep aside many such objections, said advocates of renewable energy.

"It affects these debates drastically," said Stephan Singer, director of climate and energy policy at the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brussels. "The driver for a renewable energy policy so far has been the climate. Now, the debates are going to be about energy security and reducing dependency."

Europe, despite its progress in developing alternative energy, remains heavily dependent on imported oil. Moreover, close-at-hand fields in the North Sea and Norway are peaking in production, which means Europeans face a future of even greater reliance on oil from the OPEC countries.

Political leaders here have been no less vocal than their American counterparts in calling on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to raise its output when it meets in Beirut this week. That could bring down prices, which peaked at $41.85 a barrel on May 17 and are now just below $40. With the weekend attack in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, prices are expected to rise when regular trading resumes Tuesday after Memorial Day.

At the same time, officials have been trying to dampen fears that oil prices will derail Europe's fragile economic recovery. For the moment, oil has made itself felt mostly in the form of higher prices. Consumer prices rose 2.5 percent in May, the highest level in more than two years.

That is higher than the 2 percent inflation target favored by the European Central Bank, which sets monetary policy for the 12 countries that use the euro. But few economists expect the bank to react sharply by, say, raising interest rates when it meets in Frankfurt on Thursday.

"There is a point in leaders saying, 'There's no need to overreact,' " said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank. "The effect of this is much less than in the 1970's."

Mr. Mayer noted that in addition to the high fuel taxes, which proportionally make crude prices less palpable within the total cost of gas, Europe has been insulated by a strong euro, which has helped it in the dollar-denominated oil market.

The question is how much a sustained price rise would hamper Europe's already anemic economic growth.

The rule of thumb, Mr. Mayer said, is that an increase from $30 a barrel to $40 a barrel would trim 0.4 percentage point from annual growth. That is a significant bite, given that the European Commission has forecast growth of 1.7 percent in 2004.

European companies, like the German chemical giant BASF, which are heavy consumers of petroleum, have warned that their profits will be dented. Airlines like British Airways and Lufthansa have added a surcharge on some flights to offset the higher cost of fuel.

There is little relief in sight for European motorists.

Taxi drivers in London have called on the city to raise cab fares to account for the higher cost of diesel. Fares were lifted by 3.4 percent last April, however, and officials said they were unlikely to raise them again so soon.

Auto clubs in Germany are pushing for a cut in fuel taxes, which are among the highest in Europe.

"The tax is not changing behavior by forcing people to buy smaller cars. It's just forcing people off the road," said Johannes Hübner, the director of communications for the Auto Club of Germany.

European leaders resisted demands to lower taxes amid the protests of 2000, and they are likely to do the so again. Raising gas taxes is equally unlikely, given the uproar it caused four years ago.

But officials realize they cannot stand still. "Our sources of oil are in the Middle East, and the Middle East is very unstable," Mr. Schlauch of the Green Party said. "We have to do things differently

Interesting take on Hydrogen in that piece. He's quiteright on a number of points though. Hydrogen is not a fuel it's an energy store. I think he's wrong about the eventual share of hydrogen in the economy. I do howver agree that hydrogen won't be nearly as universal. Hydrogen wll find it's niche maybe not as a vehicle propellant but as an energy storage medium wherever electricity is produced by renewable means. Batteries on that scale are impractical. but produxing hydrogen with electricity is very efficient and getting that back through a fuel cell is similarly efficient, particular;y in a large non mobile one.

He also fails to criticise the fact thathydrogen is a bugger to store, especially in a car. The molecules are so small they seep out between the atoms in any normal tank. You need a bulky pressurised tank to stop this from happening.

Despite this one possible use of hydrogen i could be in ordinary intenal combustion engines which can run on hydrogen with some verycheap alterations.

WASHINGTON - The idea of American energy independence is a myth and the United States must maintain "constructive relationships" with oil-producing countries for its own prosperity, the head of petroleum giant Exxon Mobil Corp. said Monday night.

"We do not have the resource base to be energy independent," Exxon Mobil chairman Lee R. Raymond said in a speech in which he outlined some of what he called the "hard truths" about global energy markets.

Raymond, who runs the world's largest publicly traded oil company, said that while other countries, including Russia, will play a growing role in supplying oil to the world, the Middle East will remain the center of supply because it holds as much as half of the world's oil reserves.

"We simply cannot avoid significant reliance on oil and gas from the Middle East because the world's supply pool (of oil) is highly dependent upon the Middle East," Raymond said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The fact that the United States and the rest of the world will have to depend increasingly for its oil and also for natural gas from Middle East, "is not a matter of ideology or politics," he said. "It is simply inevitable."

Raymond scoffed at suggestions — heard commonly among politicians in Washington — of energy independence.

"We periodically hear calls for U.S. energy independence as if this were a real option," he said. "The fact is, the United States is a part of the world energy market and we must participate and compete in that market."

At a time when relations with some major oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are strained, Raymond said the United States must work to "maintain appropriate and constructive relationships with oil-rich countries in the future. They will be very important for our prosperity and our security."

Responding to a question from the audience about the recent terrorist attacks that killed oil workers in Saudi Arabia, Raymond said they "obviously give us a lot of pause" because Exxon Mobil has workers and investments in petrochemical plants and refineries in the country.

`We're going through a difficult patch right now ... and may for some time," he said.

Exxon Mobil earned a record $21.5 billion last year, nearly double the previous year, and also reported record earnings during the first quarter of this year as crude oil and gasoline prices soared.

Raymond predicted that fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — will continue to provide most of the energy for many decades, even if there are improvement in conservation and efficiency and expansion of other energy sources.

As for global warming, Raymond expressed - as he often has — his skepticism about the science and predicted that in the decades ahead "carbon dioxide emissions from greater fossil fuel use will climb."

Carbon dioxide is the leading "greenhouse gas" that many scientists believe eventually will cause a warming of the earth if allowed to continue to grow.

"We simply do not yet have the economic solutions or technologies that would permit us to meet future energy demands without carbon emissions growth," Raymond said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If0PVzsZMqg

never forget!

george s. owns up to letting rudy get away with lying
http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2010/01/giuliani-update.html

Old news, but I still can't get out of my head that he said "Ninety-three percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks." I mean even forgetting about the fallacy behind what he *meant* to say, what he said is barely a coherent thought.

Rudy Giuliani is actually several small angry children glued together and stuffed inside a suit

Oh god, he's on TV AGAIN. Please, Rudy - we heard this stuff when you were mayor.

Ha - he just said "statistics don't tell you anything." Whatever. Then he cites some of his own and says "that's a fact".

that he managed to survive 9/11 is an American tragedy

sadly he'd done most of the damage already by that point

this fuckface

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/giuliani-why-do-mosques-oppose-police-surveillance-if-they-have-nothing-to-hide/

He'd strengthen his argument if he had a live webcam, complete with audio, following him everywhere he went 24 hours a day. Rudy has nothing to hide, right?

http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/amcon1.jpg

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-19/giuliani-says-blackberry-can-help-make-the-world-safe-again

the mayor of 9/11

Alas

EXCLUSIVE: Rudy Giuliani and his wife Judith are divorcing after 15 years of marriage https://t.co/eRh1iHIPTO

— Page Six (@PageSix) April 4, 2018

not rudi too!

https://www.dcreport.org/2018/10/31/group-calls-investigation-of-guiliani-trump-money-laundering-scheme/

this is a weird thread

Sir with all due respect U fucked your cousin

— Desus Nice (@desusnice) August 17, 2019