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We’re having MT/Perl gremlins, and our crack team of gremlin hunters (hi, Evariste!) are on the job.

So I’ve been reading some materials suggested to me by Mark Perry, which I’ll try and set out for discussion in a bit, but I tripped over one thing which ought to explain why it is that I don’t automatically genuflect when someone explains that they are a professional diplomat or otherwise have expertise in diplomatic affairs and go on to make an argument from authority.

Over at the ‘American Educational Trust’ website, they ran a criticism of a Washington Post review of Mark Perry’s book, ‘A Fire in Zion‘.

The substance of the book is interesting, but more interesting to me is this side comment by the author:

A shameless example of the other kind of book review, blasting it so that it won’t be read, was the Post’s hatchet job two years ago on The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball and his son, Douglas Ball. A professional and deeply compassionate study by the now deceased diplomatic and business titan and his historian son, The Passionate Attachment was nevertheless belittled by the Post’s reviewer, Walter Laqueur, a career apologist for Israel.

Laqueur could not refute the Balls’ facts and their conclusions that Israel was an unadmirable country enabled to exist only by annual multibillion dollar gifts from a neo-Rothschild, the American taxpayer. So, ignoring the book’s actual contents, Laqueur snidely intimated in what essentially was a non-review that since the Balls’ complaints were so numerous, both they and their book were somehow discredited.

[emphasis added]

The author of this piece?

Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was U.S. ambassador to the state of Qatar at the time of his retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service. He also served in London, Augsburg and Frankfurt, Beirut, Jerusalem, Amman, Baghdad, Dhaka, Tehran, Manama, and Wellington.

Obviously an experienced professional diplomat. Who believes that Israel is ‘…an unadmirable country…’ Nice locution, isn’t it?

Today, Glenn Frankel in the Washington Post legitimized Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis in a column entitled “A Beautiful Friendship? In search of the truth about the Israel lobby’s influence on Washington” It’s the typical recital of the ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and Israel, and the roots of that relationship, made timely by the tension within U.S. policy circles as violence spreads in the Middle East.

Frankel explains:

No, it’s about power. And not just Israeli power. It’s really about the perceived power of the Israel lobby, a collection of American Jewish organizations, campaign contributors and think tanks — aided by Christian conservatives and other non-Jewish supporters — that arose over the second half of the 20th century and that sees as a principle goal the support and promotion of the interests of the state of Israel.

Thanks to the work of the lobby and its allies, Israel gets more direct foreign aid — about $3 billion a year — than any other nation. There’s a file cabinet somewhere in the State Department full of memoranda of understanding on military, diplomatic and economic affairs. Israel gets treated like a NATO member when it comes to military matters and like Canada or Mexico when it comes to free trade. There’s an annual calendar full of meetings of joint strategic task forces and other collaborative sessions. And there’s a presidential pledge, re-avowed by Bush in the East Room, that the United States will come to Israel’s aid in the event of attack.

He explicitly references Mearshimer and Walt:

Not everyone believes this is a good thing. In March two distinguished political scientists — Stephen Walt from Harvard and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago — published a 42-page, heavily footnoted essay arguing that the Bush administration’s support for Israel and its related effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East have “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.”

The professors claim that our intimate partnership with Israel is both dangerous and unprecedented. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest,” they argue. They go on to say that the war in Iraq “was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence,” and that the same combine is “using all of the strategies in its playbook” to pressure the administration into being aggressive and belligerent with Iran. The bottom line: “Israel’s enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.”

A sweet deal for Israel, in other words, but a very bad one for America.

Some of the lobby’s critics hailed the essay as a much-needed breath of fresh air and praised Walt and Mearsheimer for their courage and — dare we say it — chutzpah. Their paper, wrote antiwar activist and media critic Norman Solomon in the Baltimore Sun, “is prying the lid off a debate that has been bottled up for decades.”

But the two professors knew they were treading on delicate ground. For generations, the idea of a cabal of powerful Jews hijacking the national interest for its own purposes has fueled anti-Semitism around the world. Supporters of Israel argued that the essay echoed those claims.

What begins in farce sometimes becomes tragedy; I’ve cited two takedowns of Mearsheimer and Walt; one by Lee Smith on Michael Totten’s blog:

True or False: “By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.”

True – not. Psyche. Yeah, true if you exclude the obviously limited influence that oil companies have exercised in US policymaking over the last seventy years. And it’s not just the oil companies doing Gulf bidding; virtually every American ambassador who’s served in Riyadh winds up with a nice package to keep selling the Saudi line back in Washington. Yes, you’re right, AIPAC’s annual budget is a whopping $40 million dollars – or precisely equivalent to the private donation Saudi prince Walid Bin Talal recently gave to two US universities to start up Islamic centers. What? Come on Steve, he gave half of it to Harvard! OK, give me the car keys. The keys to the car, it’s how you got here. In a car. It has four wheels and a motor. It runs on gas. Gas comes from a place called Saudi Arabia….

And more crucially, one in the New Republic by historian Benny Morris who eviscerates the historical basis for their claims:

… In their introduction, Mearsheimer and Walt tell their readers that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars…. The evidence on which they rest is not controversial.” This is ludicrous. I would offer their readers a contrary proposition: that the “facts” presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the “evidence” they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias. That is what will be not in serious dispute among scholars.

As to my own response, I’ll offer this:

and this: “Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude” by Robert Baer.

The Saudi investment in our political class easily balances the Israel lobby’s; a better reporter writing for a better editor would have avoided the cheap shot Frankel takes and wrote about the balancing act in Washington between these two powerful interest groups, and the way that national interest may or may not factor in to decisions made in between the powerful jaws of these opposing interests.

Frankel wasn’t that reporter today, and the Post wasn’t that paper.

[Update: They’re even lower in my estimation now. On rereading the article, based on other bloggers view that it was ‘relatively even-handed’, I thought for a sec and said – no it isn’t.

Here’s one thing (from the Post):

Pro-Israel interests have contributed $56.8 million in individual, group and soft money donations to federal candidates and party committees since 1990, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. (By contrast, the center says, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim groups donated $297,000 during the same period.)

Hmmm. Seems light, no? Here’s a September 2004 article from the Center for Public Integrity:

Saudi Arabia has spent more of its petroleum dollars lobbying the U.S. government than any of the other 10 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a total of $6.6 million since mid-2003.

All told, the Saudi government and companies within the kingdom have hired 11 lobby shops and public relations firms to plead their case before official Washington and the American public, the Center for Public Integrity has found.

Business spiked on K Street soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Saudis have spent more than $20 million on lobbying and public relations efforts in the United States since the terrorist attacks, according to foreign lobbying disclosure filings with the U.S. Department of Justice.

So Frankel cites $300,000 in donations over 16 years, while another sources cites over $20 million from one source – the Saudi government – from 2002 to 2004. Over to the post…]

Amplifying the interesting germ of a discussion below, in which Michael Totten and Mark Perry are held as holding opposing views, are Totten’s latest posts re Israel and Lebanon:

What should the Israelis have done instead? They should have treated Hezbollahland as a country, which it basically is, and attacked it. They should have treated Lebanon as a separate country, which it basically is, and left it alone. Mainstream Lebanese have no problem when Israel hammers Hezbollah in its little enclave. Somebody has to do it, and it cannot be them. If you want to embolden Lebanese to work with Israelis against Hezbollah, or at least move in to Hezbollah’s bombed out positions, don’t attack all of Lebanon.

Israel should not have bombed Central Beirut, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed my old neighborhood, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed the Maronite city of Jounieh, which was not merely anti-Hezbollah but also somewhat pro-Israel.

Israelis thinks everyone hates them. It isn’t true, especially not in Lebanon. But they will make it so if they do not pay more attention to the internal characteristics of neighboring countries. “The Arabs” do not exist as a bloc except in the feverish dreams of the Nasserists and the Baath.

Folks, that’s not that far from Perry’s key policy point, and one of the reasons I’ve asked him to engage me in a discussion here on the blog. I have a tentative “yes” and will try and firm things up in the next day or so.

I’m watching the events in the Middle East like the rest of us, and trying to put them into some kind of order in my own mind. Expect a post Monday…

But in the meantime, I have to ding Laura Rozen, over at the Prospect. She interviews Mark Perry, “co-director of the Conflicts Forum, a Beirut-based nongovernmental organization that has, over the past three years, put former senior American and British policy-makers and intelligence officials in talks with Hezbollah and other militant political Islamic groups in Lebanon”:

Q: We’ve been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah’s Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that?

Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it’s not true.

Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it — so he went and got them.

The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.

Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking “Oh my God,” you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say “Oops, sorry, wrong time” or you can say, “Hey, this is war.”

It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, “Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”

Mark needs to get out and talk to his Hezbollah buddies more, because Lebanese blogger Raja was watching Nasrallah on Lebanese TV and says:

Update 31: Nasrallah says that Hizballah has been working on this operation for five months.

Um, Mark? Over to you, Laura…

See the update…

Boy, that was an annoying cliche when it was first spoken, back in the ’60s. It continues to be annoying today, even when I use it.

Today, it’s puzzling to me how it is that the left blogs, who make ‘speaking truth to power’ their raison d’etre, seem totally incapable of having anyone speak to them.

Now, making fun of Oliver Willis is kind of cheating. But I’ve got to laugh a bit as one of the pet bloggers of Media Matters for America, an organization devoted to “correcting conservative misinformation” is unwilling to engage in dialog about misinformation he posts himself.

He linked to my Examiner piece on Lieberman, and just flat missed the point.

I registered, and posted a comment. You can see a screenshot here.

What I said was:

Oliver, Oliver. Ya gotta read the posts before you comment on them.

I didn’t say that “not having Joe Lieberman in Washington” would be a bad thing for the Democratic party, I said that “having Joe Lieberman in Washington after having been kicked in the nuts by the netroots and the Democratic party” was a bad thing.

It’s a subtle difference, but it matters.

Hugs to George and the folks at M.M.

A.L.

You can’t read it on his site, because he hasn’t approved it in moderation. Two later comments have appeared; and maybe his comment tools allow more trusted commenters to post directly, in which case I’ll apologize, Or maybe Oliver just isn’t comfy when people don’t applaud everything he says.

There are certainly commenters here who challenge everything from my math to my sanity, and I think I’m a better thinker and writer because of them.

The antidote to bad speech ought to be more speech, not muzzles.

[Update: the comment has appeared, and Oliver (politely as always) informs us that new commenters must be approved (because he is so popular), so I’ll hereby apologize for assuming he was censoring me.]

[Update: My bad on getting the wrong commenter. It was Walter’s Ridge, not Hypocracyrules, who thought I got a righeous beeatch-slappin’. I just suck with names, there’s no other excuse. Apologies to Hypocracy…]

So Red Dan, from DailyKos was polite enough to post a link to the diary he did on my Lieberman article – surprisingly, he didn’t like it.

Walter’s Ridge Hypocracyrules sees his article as “a righteous beeatch-slappin’”

My favorite quote:

Most likely win? Based on what? One poll taken in May/June? Based on assumptions and assertions about the CT demographic and voter makeup? How about this:

All Connecticut voters disapprove 72 – 24 percent of the job President Bush is doing. Voters disapprove 73 – 23 percent of the way the President is handling the Iraq war and say 63 – 33 percent that going to war in Iraq was the wrong thing to do.

That was taken from the same June 8 poll (Quinnipiac) showing Lamont starting to cut into Lieberman’s lead in the primary and gaining significantly in a three way race for the Senate. That poll was followed up by this poll from Rasmussen and Another poll from Rasmussen both showing that not only is Lieberman losing ground in the primary, but he is losing ground in the Senate election race itself. And those polls were in early June.

Mr. Danziger, please tell me what that says about the chances for Lamont to win should he get the nod in the Democratic Primary.

So let’s click through to his Rasmussen poll #2. read along, and we get to this gem:

In the General Election, Lieberman wins handily as either a Democrat or an Independent.

I keep telling people, a) you have to read the whole thing; and b) you have to assume people will actually click through on the links you post, so they can’t blow away the claim you make for them.

What did Walter’s Ridge Hypocracyrules say? ‘a righteous beeatch-slappin‘…yup, I feel slapped all right. One of these days someone will do it with a fact in their hand, and it’ll hurt.

But until then, one key thing needs to be remembered:

It’s all about the war. In response to the list of comments by Andrew Lazarus, our buddy Hypocracyrules, and Walter’s Ridge, I’d like one simple thing from the Democratic Party – #1) Figure out a strategy for dealing with Islamism that doesn’t involve a) super-ninja warriors who will, undetected, identify and mysteriously kill bad guys without disturbing anyone else or b) NUKE THE BIYATCHES; I’ve made a small shedload of proposals as to what that might be, and as to areas where GWB is leaving the door open and someone ought to shut it. I think Bush is vulnerable to all kinds of challenges, but sadly, as poor a hand as it may be, you can’t beat a pair of twos with nothing.

It’s probably time to review them and set them out in a post, but that’ll take a few days.

In November, we’ll see who gets ‘a righteous beeatch-slappin’ and then we’ll settle down to the hard work of building a party that can will and will be able to do something good for the country once it does.

As a point of historical interest, let me amplify the point I make over at the Examiner and below about the netroots and Lieberman.

Note that today, there are a number of explanations as to why Lieberman was opposed and why the blogs came out against him.

Let me refer you to a key blog post (from back in January; I saved it when it was new) by Matt Stoller at MyDD.

Believe it or not, I’m not sold on a primary challenge to Lieberman.  As I have written before, Connecticut is a machine state; facing down a machine is not easy.

The issues Matt raises go more to the risks to the progressive blogsphere

We face real risks should we pick this fight. The progressive blogosphere is right now facing a crisis of legitimacy. Though blogs funneled massive amounts of money to Kerry in 2004, to the DNC when Dean was elected, and to individual candidates, we are seen as disorganized, immature and incoherent. We tend not to break through to the established media. Big donors do not fund us, unlike all the other groups in the party. We truly are on our own. Our latent allies – Dean, Reid, Slaughter – cannot work through us because we don’t bring enough to the table. Contrast this to Redstate, which has around 20,000 readers, around 2% of the traffic of Daily Kos, yet has played some role in the current House leadership election contest. They know politics, they take politics seriously, and they are taken seriously as a result. They also have advantages we do not – the founders of Redstate were already members of the Republican political elite.

and he’s not sure why Joe should be challenged

Yet, in picking this fight against Lieberman, we’re not really running ‘on’ something. I see no thread of articulated principles here that would justify a Lieberman challenge. The Sierra Club at least looks at your environmental record. What do we look at? The number of times someone has reiterated right-wing frames? What are we looking for in a candidate, that Lieberman isn’t? I’m looking for principles here, things to wrap ourselves in.

If we are making demands, which supporting a primary challenger is doing, what are they? If we simply make the demand that a candidate not be Lieberman, then what kind of legitimacy does that confer on us as a group? How can other politicians follow that lead? They can’t. And if we are demanding leadership from our party, and from our political system as a whole, we have to show some ourselves.

The he updates, based on the comments (and you should read them all)

UPDATE: I’m really liking the comments so far. Three points in particular are principles that define what he does that we do not like:

– His support for policies that are ruining America’s military and standing in the world
– His support for borrow and spend policies that are bringing the American economy to a grinding halt
– His failure to hold the executive branch accountable

So if I can restate the three reasons:

a) He supports the war;
b) He’s supported Bush’s fiscally irresponsible budget policies;
c) He isn’t vehement enough in opposing Bush (which really reflects back to a) and b) in my view)

Hmmm. The short answer is that he isn’t fighting Bush as hard as he can.

One of the posts linked to in Matt’s piece is by Mark Schmitt at the Decembrist (great blog title, btw):

Another line was certainly crossed by Joe Lieberman last week, when he said, “It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Well, if like I and a few others do, you think there is an actual war on, you have a fine tightrope to walk as the opposition party. You need to oppose, but you also ostensibly have some obligation to the greater national loyalty you are supposed to feel ahead of your party loyalty.

Hmmmm. And that’s why Lieberman is being pushed off the island. Because he feels a greater loyalty to the national interest than to his party interest,

Now I’d be remiss in pointing out that Bush has left himself open to this by his abject failure to – as I’ve said in the past – sell the war, reach across the aisle and realize that this is an effort that will continue long after he’s out of office, and that the Democrats need to be brought along as well.

But in the context of Pelosi’s threat to push Jane Harman off of the Intelligence Committee, the only conclusion I can draw is that to be a good Democrat these days, it’s all for the good of the party.

I’ve been swamped this last week and over the weekend, so have been remiss in a couple areas here – one of them replying to Rev Sensing (sorry, I owe you a response…), and in mentioning that Mark Tapscott approached me last week and asked if I’d contribute occasional pieces to the Examiner chain as a member of their ‘Blogger Board’. The group includes Jeralyn Merritt – with whom I’ve had some serious disagreements, but who stepped up and wrote a great response to the whole Deb Frisch embarrassment. Others include Dan Gillmor, Ed from Captain’s Quarters, Betsy Newmark and others I don’t have the time to look up just now (I’ve got a package to mail to Iraq).

So I dashed off a piece to see if I could get some feedback on whether it was the kind of thing they were looking for, and darn if they didn’t go and publish it…

…it’s on Joe Lieberman and the ‘marching off the cliff’ wing of the Democratic Party, who think they will win by beating him in the primary and forcing him to run – and likely win – as an Independent. If I’d had more time, I’d have added the image that was really in the back of my mind when I wrote it – the Black Knight from ‘Holy Grail.

It’s less polished than I wish, and I promise to do better next time. Check it out and let me know how.

Rev. Sensing, in his post below, sets out the difficulty in replacing oil as a means of providing and distributing energy.

I’ll agree – that replacing oil in one swell foop is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

But I don’t think that matters; I think he’s asking the wrong question. Let’s step back for a second and talk about what problem we’re really trying to solve.

Let me do a fast gloss on my position on global warming (something I haven’t blogged on before because it kept coming out as a PhD dissertation by someone who didn’t know the subject).

It’s happening.

It’s not clear how much is anthropogenic (although the answer is probably a lot), and it’s not clear what the impact on climate would be if we just stopped producing CO2 tomorrow.

It is clear that it doesn’t matter, because we’re not going to. Neither, to agree with Friedman here, are we going to take on the pain of cutting our carbon emissions enough or fast enough to impact climate in the next decade. And if we did, the ensuing economic collapse would probably kill more people than climate change will.

That may or may not matter so some deep greens; but since the odds of it happening are about where the odds of asteroid collision in the next decade are, I think we can shelve that concept.

The fact that we can’t do enough doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something. Even if you’re a die-hard skeptic, wondering why there is global warming on Mars if there are no SUV’s (there is, by the way), it makes sense to look hard at our energy economy.

From my point of view, there are three reasons energy is worth some serious investment:

1. Slow the rate of carbon emissions, in the off chance that they will have an impact on global warming.

2. Slow the rate of investment in jihad by the oil-rich Arab states, who have been the principal financiers of the spread of the core religious ideology that – when combined with alienation and anomie – leads to recruits who blow themselves and others up.

3. Shelter our domestic energy infrastructure from disruption – whether through embargo, terrorism, or system disruption caused by error or chance.

The goal is to have cheap, low-impact, sustainable, and local supplies of energy. Cheap to maximize the benfit to our economy and the disruption to the Saudi economy; low-impact because if it involves massive changes in infrastructure or behavior it won;t happen; sustainable because we’re not looking for a one-time hit, but for an energy economy that can keep going indefinitely; and local because when all other things are equal, local energy supplies are more efficient (less transmission loss) and harder to disrupt.

The cheapest, lowest impact, most sustainable, and most local form of energy production is what the utilities call ‘negawatts’ – energy we are currently using that can readily be saved though investment or changes in behavior.

Before everyone starts painting pictures of unheated Stalinist apartment blocks, filled with people wearing dingy clothes (no hat water to wash in) walking down ten flights to catch the smoky diesel tram to work – or the positive vision of the same image, which is hemp-clad families hopping onto their bicycles to commute the five miles to their office above the day care center – feature this:

(I’ve told this story before, so forgive me) Six years ago, I needed a new car to replace the minivan I gave my ex- in the divorce. I had three sons, we camp and ski, and so the mandate was three rows of seats (so I don’t have to Tase them too often on long trips) with space in back to put the plastic Tupperware boxes of gear that we travel with.

There were only three cars (plus several 12-passenger vans) that fit the requirement. Ford Excursion, Chevy or GMC Suburban, and a Honda Odyssey minivan.

The Excursion was Right Out. It came down to the Suburban or the Odyssey.

I chose the Odyssey, and never looked back. It has been fun to drive, reliable as a brick, easy to park, and worked in every kind of environment I’ve tossed at it, from taking TG and me to the opera or taking three heavily armed men to the dire road leading to Gunsite for a class.

And – I saved about 42% of the gas I would have used. The Suburban, with the base engine, gets 14.7mpg EPA; over the 110,000 miles I’ve driven, I’d have used 7,483 gallons. In the Honda – using the EPA figure of 25mpg, I used 4,395. And I sacrificed – what, exactly? Self-image? Not terribly much.

It’s a small thing, but the error I think that Sensing (and others) are making is that they are looking for One Big solution when in reality there are a hundred small ones. This idea – substituting minivans for SUV’s is a small idea, but there are probably hundreds of them – ideas big enough to have an impact but small enough to be doable without changing the whole world.

So, over the last six years, we’ve sold about 40 million SUV’s (figure roughly 50% of new car sales of 14 million units/ year – not a figure I’ve checked, but it’s close to correct).

So 21 million SUV’s (half the number sold) times six years (duration) times 3,000 gallons – we would have saved 58 BILLION gallons of gasoline if everyone who had bought a SUV bought a minivan instead. Yes, the numbers are approximate and skewed because not all SUV’s are as thirsty as a Suburban…but not all minivans are as thirsty as an Odyssey.

To put that into some kind of reference, the annual gasoline consumption in the US for 2005 (US DOE Energy Information Agency) was about 3.33 billion barrels, or 140 billion gallons (42 ga to a barrel). We would have saved about 10 billion gallons/year (total savings/6) or 7% of our gasoline budget with that one change.

That’s about 3% of our national energy budget. Just from driving minivans.

Are there ten changes like that which we could make?

Here’s one more vehicle-related one.

Back when I was a young violator of the California Vehicle Code, I had a hopped-up BMW 2002. It was a quick car for the day, and it did 0-60 in about 10 seconds. A 1969 Porsche 911 did it in about 8.5 or 9.

My Odyssey does it in 10.3. A Subaru Legacy does it in about 7.5 seconds, and a Legacy GT does it in about 5.5.

We’re consuming all the great engineering that has been done in the last 30 years in a mix of higher performance, lower emissions and better fuel economy.

What would happen if we simply cranked the dial back to the performance levels of the 70’s or 80’s? How much better would the fuel economy of these modern engines be? Another 3%?

At what cost?

Look this is a long post, but it’s meant to do one thing – to cast some doubt on Rev. Sensing’s certainty.

I don’t think we need a Big Bang energy solution – yet.

I do think there are a lot of little ones we could do – while still leading our suburban lifestyles – that would get us a lot of the way there.

Where would you find 3% in our energy budget?
–