The Truth About Iran's CNG Vehicles (T-Boning T. Boone)
In T. Boone Pickens’ latest TV campaign, the aspiring compressed natural gas kingpin patriotic oil addiction interventionist points out that most Iranian autos run on CNG. According to T., that’s because they save the oil for export to saps like us. It is a shameless, outrageous manipulation of the facts. The former Texas oilman forgets to mention that Iran imports some 40 percent of its gasoline– which still isn’t enough to satisfy demand. The Iranian government has rationed gas since last year, with predictable consequences. The New York Times reported on the result back in June of ’07: “Unrest spread in Tehran on Thursday, the second day of gasoline rationing in oil-rich Iran, with drivers lining up for miles, gas stations being set on fire and state-run banks and business centers coming under attack.” In fact, according to Iranian analyst Saeed Leylaz, “We are importing gasoline from 16 different countries. The country would be on the verge of collapse if they suddenly decide not to sell us gasoline. The government has to find a way to lower the consumption.” Which leads us to the aforementioned CNG and dual-fuel vehicles. Green Car Congress confirms the country’s switch to natural gas, reporting a sales jump from 20k to 429k CNG-powered cars per year. Even if you trust those numbers (courtesy Iranian Minister of Industries and Mines Ali-Akbar), do we really want to imitate a state-controlled automobile industry? And by you I don’t mean Detroit or T. Boone Pickens, obviously.
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Charly, It's not correct at all that Russia had fantastic growth under Stalin if you look at the whole picture. If you take out what they stole it won't look good at all. They may have been entitled to take whole factories from Germany and ship them back to Russia, but that won't make me give points to Stalin for economic growth. He may have been able to greatly improve the country technology wise, but he did it like the Czars before him, using slave labor and diversion of resources, not by growing. How do you account for the millions slaughtered on the balance sheet? It did catch up with them in the end, and the whole thing collapsed so when you do the books, it's not going to be pretty.
I was talking about the growth until 1941 which was very high. I seriously doubt that those german factories were anywhere close to the destruction caused by WWII. ps. What do you mean with stole? What they got from Germany and the other axis members or from the USSR
Charly, If you look at '41, the best case you can make is rapid advancement from almost nothing to a near modern level of production in a narrow choice of industries (tanks, planes, firearms). At the same time the rest of the economy stood still or retreated. Not a bad decision militarily, but it is misleading to look at 40,000 tanks and give someone an award for economic growth. The people building those tanks were starving, and had not seen material wealth increase at all. In fact, many of them had become slave or prisoner labor due to race or politics. When I say stole, I mean stole. The state took property from individuals in country (an economic loss in most cases, but the commies added it to their books like they built it). The state took everything they could from lands the military liberated or conquered. Soldiers actually had a quota for how much looted goods they could ship home. They took whole factories apart, piece by piece and sent them by rail back to Russia. In many cases, they then had to get german and other prisoners to help them reconstruct them and operate them because they didn't know how. Even when they learned how to operate them, they could not do so efficiently because the workers had to steal material from their jobs in order to have a decent income. Wonderfully inefficient.
When the USA entered the war it also stopped making as many consumer products. But i'm not interested in USSR 1941. I'm interested in the USSR 1940 and its enormous growth compare with the USSR 1925. You could say that the regime stole but Britain and the United States did so on an even larger scale. ps. You don't have to tell me that communisme is inefficient compared with a market economy, i know. But that doesn't mean that the USSR didn't have impressive growthnumbers in the 1930's. About landtheft, bit rich for an American to talk about it but if you look at most countries you see that it is normal.