Okay I need someone to explain something to me. Why are all the democrats insistent on keeping oil prices high through hindering more US drilling and instead Barack Obama and many of the others want to industrialize all of our open land with wind farms and vast solar arrays? And all the while trying to hinder oil and coal usage. And on the other side Republicans are trying to open up for more drilling to get oil prices down but they seem content to continue on this same cycle of supply and demand we've been on. This isn't the first time there has been energy problems but Americans have short term memories and as long as times are good, we are content to forget about the hard times and what took place that led us into hard times or how we got out of them in the past.
If you watch the news on tv or listen to talk radio much you'll hear energy issues discussed at length with each side trying to point out how wrong the other side is. What I don't understand though is that I have never heard the issues of energy costs, alternative energy sources, or energy transmission discussed in the context of anything but a national level.
I don't claim to have any answers for what happens to you at the gas pump but here's what I know for sure: My heating bills for my house will be higher than ever this year and here in Pennsylvania when electric companies get deregulated my electric bill is set going to go up more than 50%. My question for all of the politicians and news commentators is this: Why not focus on energy for individual households? Thousands of people already have energy independent homes and the number is growing all of the time. There are many options available for people hoping to go independent including: wind power, micro-hydroelectric, and of course solar. Those are just the options available right now, if there was actually a public spotlight put on it in a big way, new better technologies would develop.
It seems to me that the logical choice for a country wishing to be energy independent would be to do so on a house by house basis. Think a minute about the benefits of this idea. There would be no centralized infrastructure that would vulnerable to natural disaster, war, or terrorist threat. There would be no power lines in danger of all of the above things as well as in constant need of maintenance. Much of America's population lives in urban settings where much of the currently available options wouldn't be viable. But geographically speaking, windpower, micro-hydroelectric, or solar would work perfectly well for the majority of the country.
For now though we will continue to have democrats ignorantly thinking we can stop using oil(anybody else fond of plastic? I'd sure miss it) and pushing alternative energies on a national scale which is not feasible. The republicans of course will continue to point out the unfeasability of the democrats approach and also not realize the value of moving away from a national concept of energy generation and consumption.
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3 comments:
Well, opening up US drilling isn't going to do any good. We might see a tiny drop in whatever astronomical gas prices we have in 10 years (I'm kind of a pessimist, so I'm sort of assuming nothing new will have happened in the alternative energy market by then), but compared to the worldwide oil bucket, we don't have much more than a drop or two to offer.
Your household-by-household energy plan seems like a good way to go... or at least something on a smaller scale than "The Whole Country." I think even a county-wide approach to this would be great. In my astronomy class (and according to a quick Google search), it was said that 92 square miles of solar panels could power the whole country. My question is "Where are those?" Throwing those things on top of our buildings kind of... makes sense.
Granted, solar power won't do any good as far as the automobile is concerned... at least not where solar technology currently exists. However, my dad was saying that they're "working on" alternative energy solutions at Chrysler, so hopefully the right people are serious about it and we'll see some advances in that direction as well.
Ever since you wrote about the number of single-person SUVs you saw, I've been paying attention as well, and it's depressing. On my commute, I'd say a good 80% of cars are gas-guzzlers (SUVs, vans, trucks, Hummers, etc.), and almost all of them contain a single person driving to or from work. Yeah, it would be great if huge factories could cut down on oil usage, but I'd really like to see the number of fuel-inefficient vehicles on the road go down. You'd think that $4.30/gallon (what I paid this morning) would convince people to go smaller, but apparently compensating is more important...
Your information about 92 square miles of solar panels powering the country is far more optimistic than any estimates I've heard.
Sounds like you are getting gouged for gas prices worse than we are, though I haven't had to fill up since hurricane Ike so I don't know what it is at currently. Cause you know the gas already in the pump suddenly got more expensive because supplies elsewhere are in trouble.
Don't you mean, "...supplies elsewhere might be in trouble"? ;)
The number that kept popping into my head was 270, but 92 was all I saw on "teh in3rwebz", so I went with it...I also got the impression it was a newer technology, so it could all just be hypothetical.
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