DRILLING OUR WAY TO OIL INDEPENDENCY ISN’T THE ANSWER
By Schuyler ThorpeAuthor and Political Activist
As much as many people would like to believe…
Drilling in our own backyard for that limited supply of oil; isn’t going to put us on the road to energy independency any quicker today, let alone tomorrow–especially from the unwavering grip of foreign oil.
For once, Bush had said the one right thing in his entire failed Presidency: It would take ten years to bring all this refined oil to market.
And from market to US consumers.
In ten years!
Imagine for the moment, that oil and gas prices aren’t likely going to subside from their current peaks–and they just continue to rise and rise, and rise.
Think paying $4.50 a gallon is bad enough here in the States? Think double that in just ten years–as global demand outstrips supply; especially if countries like China and India continue to use more and more oil.
Oil prices will most like have surpassed $200 easy, even $300 a barrel; in concordance with a dollar that’s as worthless as the German mark was during the second world war–with most oil-producing countries now trading in other forms of currency like the euro–instead of the greenback.
US consumers are beyond pinched for money–as sky-high gas prices and food prices have forced many Americans to fall back on other means of getting food or growing it themselves.
By the time oil from these allegedly built refineries comes back to America, the average drop in gas prices wouldn’t make much of a real difference to the consumer strapped to the core by high has prices.
The sad truth is, most of the 68 million acres of land leased to Big Oil has gone unused these last 10 or 20 years. Big Oil doesn’t want to build new refineries or refine further more oil into gas.
What they do want is more free handouts from the federal government. And in the meantime, production at most US refineries in the here and now continue to drop here and there; in a transparent effort to artificially inflate the price at the pump and elsewhere.
Combined with a weak dollar and many other geopolitical factors, there just simply isn’t enough oil in our own country (that being 3% of the world's total reserves held by the United States of America) to sustain our current burn rate of 21-28 million barrels of oil per day.
Blaming past administrations for opting out of drilling in our own backyard is not going to make our problem go away either.
The harsh reality is, is that America is finally at a crossroads with its oil dependency. Call it an apex if you will–a peak which must only start downwards until we hit rock bottom again.
In light of that, we must start developing alternate sources of energy–and wean ourselves off this oil trip. Nuclear power is a limited option, because disposing of all that waste is even more trickier now, than it was back in the 70s–prior to Three Mile Island.
Building ten more–like McCain envisions–would take billions of dollars and years of political and environmental wrangling from all sides, before they can even be started; let alone completed.
What we can do as a country, as a people, and as a nation, is to start addressing our failing transportation infrastructure and obsolete power grid.
Rebuild both so that we can go green. The South and the Southwest have the two abundant sources of energy which has been surprisingly overlooked for the last 30 years: Solar and wind.
The Northeast can also benefit strongly from wind energy. But they can also start building tidal-generating stations to run clean energy from the ocean that way.
The Midwest has more of the same wind and solar benefits as their southern cousins. And they can build a hydro-electric generating station along the Mississippi River and use its power to generate clean energy.
The West Coast presently is using both wind and solar to power a small portion of their energy needs, but are also into hydroelectric power as well.
However, it’s not enough to give the country its needed independency from fossil fuels.
If we could only apply what we know about improved wind and solar technology nation-wide, we would be close to our oil independency 10 years hence than we are now.
Unfortunately, what’s standing in the way of that nice vision is Big Oil, one-sided politics, and of course…blind ignorance.
And those will take a long time to get over than our immediate need to exploit our environment for a few years’ worth of black gold.
Schuyler Thorpe is an author, a political activist, and a frequent letter writer to The Everett Herald of Snohomish County. He can be reached at: starchildalpha1 at yahoo.com
Labels: Big Oil, drilling, economy, energy dependence, energy policies, enviroment, hydroelectric power, oil, solar, wind
posted by Schuyler Thorpe @ 6:09 PM
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