Stop Being So Narrow Minded

I can't afford to put gas in my car but Barack Hussein Obama and T Boone Pickens says “We can’t drill our way out of this” of course he says that he has big stakes in wind generation. Pick any glassy eyed Democrat out of a crowd and he’ll recite the memorized tripe about conservation and idle oil fields (fallacy), Republicans say we need to “Drill here Drill now” but there all just memorized talking points and fancy slogans. I used to be a mechanic so I know the benefits of a well tuned car and fully inflated tires, I don’t use my A/C (which drives my wife crazy by the way), I work from home one day a week, I ride my bike, combine trips whenever possible, I drive a little “skate” even though I could go finance a giant gas guzzling SUV if I wanted to but all my conservation has not added a single gallon to my gas tank. I bought in to the whole Ethanol thing in fact I own a flex-fuel vehicle but we now see what using our food to feed our cars has done. Now we find out that Ethanol may be lower in carbon emissions but it produces more carcinogens such as formaldehyde.

The truth is no one single thing is going to fix the energy crisis it’s going to take a combination of everything. We are waste full as Americans we do need to learn to conserve but we also need to become more self-reliant & start producing more of our own oil. I keep hearing the mantra that “Even if we did start drilling today we wouldn't get any relief for 10 years” that’s stretching the truth if not a bold faced lie. The fact of the matter is Drilling for more oil will provide greater measure relief sooner than any other source either in development or currently in production because the infrastructure is already in place. At this point however fossil fuels should only be a crutch till we can build the infrastructure for better means of producing electricity.

I grew up in a town where the wind blew every day and as a child I always wondered why the wind was not used to produce electricity. Today wind is becoming feasible but it is still a way off due to obvious challenges such as finding places where there is enough constant wind around the clock to be reliable because storage on that level still has not become viable. Today one of the most practical alternative sources is nuclear but for some reason we do not match up to other countries. According to the IAEA in 2006 the US only received 19% of its electricity from Nuclear Generation, France received 78% and Belgium 54% we sit at the bottom of the list with Russia and South Africa with 16 & 4 percent respectively. There are many other alternatives but my point is our politicians need to stop being so narrow-minded there is no silver bullet per-say for this problem we need to attack it from all sides we need to drill now, we need to conserve and we need to come up with feasible alternative means to produce energy.