The Energy Price Calculator

Where are energy prices going? Crude oil seems to have come off its highs at $75 per barrel. But is it finished yet?

In NRO Thomas E. Nugent takes a look at natural gas prices. They exploded last year around the time of Hurricane Katrina, peaking at about $15 per million btu. Now natural gas prices are down at about $6 per million btu. He thinks that the same decline is likely to happen to crude oil. Maybe it is already happening.

But what everyone wants to know is: How does crude oil at $70 per barrel compare with other energy prices? With gasoline, with natural gas, with electrity. Even with coal.

Road to the Middle Class is proud to bring you your very own energy price calculator that we stole off the Department of Energy EIA Energy Kids Page.

Go ahead. Enter the current crude oil price in the crude oil box and press “Calculate.”

Energy Price Conversion Calculator (thanks to Robert Collette)
Crude Oil	Gasoline	Natural Gas	Electricity	Coal
$	$	$	$	$
$/bbl	$/gal (w/o tax)	$/mmbtu	$/Kwh	$/short ton

Here are some other useful resources on the energy price front.

• Monthly Natural Gas Price
  
• Monthly Crude Oil Price
  
• Annual Electricity Price
  

Enjoy!

Hot-head McCain Cool At New School

United States Senator John McCain may have a reputation as a hot-head. He may be deeply mistrusted by the conservative base. But he certainly struck the right note when he gave a commencement speech at the New School for Social Research in New York City on May 19, 2006.

You’ll remember that the open-minded faculty and students at the New School, noted for its tolerance for diverse viewpoints, demonstrated against Sen. McCain during his speech. And let us not forget, writes conservative Ann Coulter,

the raw heroism of Jean Rohe, the student at the New School who gave a speech attacking the commencement speaker, Republican Sen. John McCain, at the commencement ceremony.

Yes, it must have taken courage to make a speech echoing the sentiments of the students and faculty at the School. In what league, then, would we put Ann Coulter, who is regularly heckled and abused when she gives speeches at college campuses? Not to mention the College Republicans who invite her?

But John McCain gave a speech exactly tailored to his audience. said he:

[W]e love our liberties much. And among those liberties we love most, particularly so when we are young, is our right to self-expression. That passion for self-expression sometimes overwhelms our civility, and our presumption that those with whom we have strong disagreements, wrong as they might be, believe that they, too, are answering the demands of their conscience.

After mentioning Vietnam, Darfur, and Rwanda, he tells of a young American who went to Hanoi to give an anti-war speech during the Vietnam war. McCain got the chance to listen to it on the radio in his prisoner-of-war cell in Hanoi.

We met some years later. He approached me and asked to apologize for the mistake he believed he had made as a young man.

Thank you, Senator McCain for saying those things at the New School for Social Research. Some day, an ordinary American kid like Jean Rohe, who grew up singing folk songs, spent a year at Smith College, and counts among her dearest friends the people she met at a summer studying at the Universidad de la Habana in Cuba, may also apologize to you for her gross insult.

But then again, maybe not.

Media Navel-gazing In NY

They had a navel-gazing session on new media vs. old media today at the Museum of Television and Radio Media Center in NYC, blogged by Jeff Jarvis and also attended by Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt said

I came away impressed by the talent and seriousness of the news professionals, but also convinced that they simply will never see that the source of their dissolving credibility is the ideological imbalance in their journalist workforce. I brought this point up a couple of times, but it was rejected as was the relevance individual writers/reporters/editors' political positions, voting records, and world views.

The problem is trust, Hewitt went on to say on his radio show, and the problem with the MSM is that the center-right audience of the MSM does not feel that it gets a fair hearing from the MSM. So they are drifting away.

Hewitt also planted a bomb by saying that

that the biggest sustained audience in broadcast is Rush Limbaugh at 20 million a week and because those people trust him. He says Rush is rebranding himself as “America’s anchor in contrast to drive-by media.”

Rush is important because he created his format and his audience himself, Hewitt said. Walter Cronkite happened along as just the right guy in the right place at the right time. But Rush has created something that they said couldn’t be done.

Why won’t the MSM admit their bias and become “transparent?” What do they gain by their absolute claim of objectivity? I suspect the answer is that if they admitted their bias then they’d have to hire people from the other side of the room. That would be OK; it might after all be interesting to have the odd conservative knocking around the newsroon. But it would mean less jobs for them and their pals. That is the real sticking point. It’s about the jobs and the glittering prizes.

It's OK to Fib About Global Warming

The thing about movements is that the truth tends to get lost in the campaign to tell the world about the Greater Truth. And that is certainly true about the Global Warming Movement.

For those of us who haven’t been heard, Patrick J. Michaels has been keeping an ear to the ground and also on Al Gore.

So here's what Al told Grist Magazine about global warming: "I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."

Then there is NASA’s James Hansen.

He also started the whole global warming hysteria, with some remarkably inflammatory congressional testimony in 1988, and he is Al Gore's climate guru. Here's what he wrote in 2003 from his Broadway office, in the online journal Natural Science: "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decisionmakers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue."

The problem with all this scare stuff is that there’s a good chance we’ll be basing public policy on a lie. There’s a lot of scare stuff going on. There’s the danger of nuclear power, the danger of drilling for oil, the danger of building highways, and the danger of eating food with pesticide residues. How dangerous are these threats, really?

We’ll never know, because the science got buried by the politics.

And we really can’t say anything about man-made global warming until we really understand the fluctuation in energy output from the sun.

It does fluctuate, you know. Scientists think that solar energy output is high when sunspot activity is high (like right now) and low when sunspot activity is down (like during the Maunder minimum half a millennium ago during the, er, Little Ice Age).

It's The Children, Stupid

The problem with Old Europe is that it is literally getting old. That’s because the Europeans aren’t having many children, writes Robert Samuelson.

The number of children per woman is called the “total fertility rate,” or TFR. Here are the estimated 2005 TFRs for some major countries: Germany, 1.4; Greece, 1.3; Italy, 1.3; Japan, 1.4; Spain, 1.3; and Russia, 1.3.

The low fertility rates translate into declining population. Here is a table of population predictions from Samuelson’s article.

POPULATION (Millions) 2005 2050 Germany 82.4 73.6 Italy 58.1 50.4 Japan 127.4 99.9 Spain 40.3 35.6

But there’s an exception to this trend of population decline. The United States. In the US the fertility rate is 2.1, exactly at replacement rate.

Nor does the U.S. rate merely reflect, as some think, a higher rate among Hispanic Americans. The fertility rate is 1.9 for non-Hispanic whites and about 2 for African-Americans, reports demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. What explains the American exception? Eberstadt cites three differences with Europe and most other advanced countries: greater optimism, greater patriotism and stronger religious values.

And don’t forget that the low fertility rate for whites includes childless liberal cities like San Francisco and Seattle.

We’ve looked at this issue here at the Road to the Middle Class before, and we’ll look at it again. One reason for high birth rates in the US may be patriarchy. You need to give people a reason to knuckle down to the hard work of raising children in a family and patriarchy is one way to mobilize both men and women to the task. As Phillip Longman argues:

Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society — nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

It’s a constant struggle for young men to decide between the demands of society and the allure of those flute girls. The way that society puts a finger on the scales to push young men and women towards child production is by promoting patriarchy.

Let's Hear It For Capitalism

When your kid comes home from her government school today, she will probably be parroting some nonsense they taught her. At school these days, writes James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State We’re In,

They teach that capitalists destroy rainforests, insidiously control American foreign policy and spread the human vices of greed and selfishness. Anti-capitalism is now the subtext of history and geography lessons, as well as politics, economics and sociology. Capitalism is said to have given rise to slavery. The state is depicted as a hero that has tempered the cruelty of the beast with laws, regulations and interventions.

All lies, of course. Nor is it true that capitalism “promotes inequality” except in the sense that it rewards people who give other people what they want.

Let us rehearse three big things that capitalism has done, in food, clothing, and cars. Capitalism, not government.

Two centuries ago, food was the biggest part in a family's budget. It was hard for a poor family to get enough to eat. Even in the 1920s, people on average spent a third of their income on food.



Now they spend only a tenth... Shortages, hunger and famine became history. That is what capitalism did. To sneer at it is to sneer at the abolition of hunger in this country.

Then there is clothing. Used to be that the poor could hardly afford any clothes. Today,

new and much cheaper methods of production have been put in place by individuals importing cotton, improving textile production techniques, deploying new kinds of transport and distributing the raw material and final products more cheaply. No longer do children share shoes.

Not government. Capitalism. And as for cars. Well, we know how many cars they had in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and today in Castro’s Cuba.

Who invented cars? Who refined their design and manufacture to the point where they are affordable by millions of people? Not governments. The diverse, resourceful, determined power of capitalism.

And it goes on and on. The astonishing thing is that, in the light of this overwhelming evidence, there are still so many people that worship the state and their benefits. What are they thinking?

They are thinking that it is much easier to demand your rights using the political system than to earn it by serving the consumer.

At Least President Bush is Brave

Nobody can tell if President Bush will turn out to be one of our greatest presidents, writes Michael Novak. But we do know one thing. He has to be our bravest president.

He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years...



He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power. Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

And now, of course, we conservatives are getting tired of him, tired of defending him, and tired of the dangers of the times.

It takes more bravery to continue walking calmly through immense hostility at home, than to face down a foreign foe, with a united nation at one's back. This, as I say, is a very brave president.

After all the rage and the invective they have indulged themselves in over the last six years, the Democrats are going to face a problem when they return to power and return to the only politics they know: patronage and pensions. If President Bush that was so dreadful and the nation was in such a mess, how come it’s just back to politics as usual?