Gas is $4 a gallon. Actually, today I found that the national average set a new record at $4.11 a gallon. It now costs $20 to mow my damn yard. I'm not the only one who feels the "pain at the pump" I know. Turn on or log on to any newscast and I guarantee that will be one of the stories. And justifiably so - fuel prices are the basis to everything. You can't buy eggs or milk or bluejeans or any Chinese-produced item from Wal-Mart without paying for the fuel it took to get it there or paying for the fuel it took to get YOU there. Fuel is the basis of our economy. Run fuel prices up and everything must follow.
But its okay. Our government has a solution. President Bush just lifted the moratorium on offshore drilling here in the US. Granted, it now takes the same action from Congress to make it official, but surely we Americans will put enough pressure on our elected officials to follow suit. After all, there is an estimated 18 billion gallons of oil off our shores. That's a lot of oil. Unfortunately, it is going to take several years of drilling to get it to the surface. But that's okay because surely that 18 billion gallons will be enough to bring fuel prices down, won't it? If it wasn't such a great solution, we wouldn't be all for it....right?
That depends on who you believe. Candidates and other politicians, notoriously known for feeding the public whatever line of crap they need to to get elected (or re-elected), would like us to believe that lifting a moratorium to offshore drilling will help our situation. On the other hand, scientists, educated people, realists, and those not pushing some political agenda see things differently. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) doesn't believe that offshore drilling here at home is going to help a whole lot. Even drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a place many politicians are just dying to open up because of the "huge" reserves there won't make much of a difference. According a report [PDF] by the EIA:
Additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR would be only a small portion of total world oil production, and would likely be offset in part by somewhat lower production outside the United States.
The report goes into a description of potential price impacts of the added production. Taken at face value, the numbers almost seem significant until you extrapolate the savings per barrel to savings at the pump - a whopping two cents!
There are plenty of potential solutions out there but digging deeper and in more places for oil just isn't one of them. We will never be energy independent if we keep relying on oil. So be careful who you listen to. I'm still guardedly confident that there is a light (or two) at the end of the tunnel. My question is when are we going to start derailing the freight train that it currently is?
“Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.” – Michael Shermer, in Scientific American: The Flipping Point
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