Something smells Fishy in Giuliani’s energy plan

Something smells Fishy in Giuliani’s energy plan

The dollar’s in the dumper. The primary reason is the amount the United States spends on imported oil. Meanwhile, we seem doomed to eternal warfare in the oil regions.

In light of these depressing facts, the views of a presidential candidate on gay sex, or any type of sex at all, are insignificant. Yet that was what got reported out of Rudy Giuliani’s appearance the other day on “Meet the Press.”

I was more interested in his views on energy. It turns out that Giuliani, like all the major presidential contenders of both parties, has a plan for ending U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Better yet, his plan, like the other plans, requires no sacrifice. We’re going to stop buying all that foreign oil and we’re going to run our cars on something else. Like the rest of the presidential contenders, Giuliani never gets around to saying what that something else is.

This reminded me of something deep in my memory. I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I called an expert in the automotive field, my friend Zeke the mechanic. He’s an expert on automotive trivia.

[The columnist reads Giuliani’s answer to Tim Russert on a bill to raise average fuel economy to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 — hybrids, clean coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, more refineries, more domestic oil.]

I was perplexed. Zeke recognized the pattern immediately.

“It’s the Fish carburetor,” he said.

Was this a carburetor that ran on fish? Nope, it was a carburetor invented by a guy named Robert Fish, Zeke told me. The carb actually worked pretty well, but a cult that sprang up around it made outrageous claims for its fuel economy.

The followers of Fish claimed harassment by certain unspecified forces, but he lived to a ripe old age. You can’t say the same for Stanley Meyer. Meyer was cut down in his prime, poisoned by the agents of Big Oil for the crime of inventing a car that could run on sea water. The Internet offers countless stories of such inventors. Americans love the idea that there is some secret source of endless energy.

[Zeke’s “fuel-pressure regulator” in the garage, which improved mileage only by starving the engine; an argument that if you want to use less oil you have to use less oil; and a passage on why expanding refinery capacity does not replace imports.]

Stan Meyer at least had an answer: water. As for Giuliani, he can’t be dumb enough to think that the United States, which already has the most oil wells on Earth, is suddenly going to hit a gusher that will triple our domestic output.

[On ethanol, and on why expanding hybrid sales does not move average fuel economy under the law as it stands.]

Meanwhile we are now spending four times as much for imported oil as we were spending on that date that so often crosses the lips of the former mayor or New York City: Sept. 11, 2001. It would be refreshing to hear Giuliani, or any of the other candidates, admit that he or she has no plan to stop enriching the Saudis, the Iranians and the Venezuelans.

The reason they don’t, I imagine, is that they all saw what happened to Stanley Meyer. Can’t take any chances.

Read this one carefully

The paragraph about poisoning is sarcasm. Mulshine is not reporting that Meyer was poisoned by the agents of Big Oil; he is reciting the legend in its flattest form in order to laugh at it, and the closing line — “they all saw what happened to Stanley Meyer. Can’t take any chances” — is the joke landing.

It is kept in the archive for two reasons. It shows that by December 2007 the story had hardened enough to be usable as a punchline in a big American daily without any explanation, which says something about how far it had travelled in nine years. And it contains, in one sentence, three of the things the archive spends its time correcting: that he was poisoned, that agents of Big Oil did it, and that the car ran on sea water.

What the archive holds about the night he died is at The day Stan died: he collapsed at a restaurant table in Grove City on the evening of Friday 20 March 1998 and died in hospital the next day, aged 57. Nobody is named as a poisoner there, because nobody can be.

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