Saturday, June 21, 2008
If Bush put every neuron of his reptillian brain to work at once he would not be able explain what off shore oil drilling has to do with $4 per gallon gasoline.
I'm not saying that we won't have to do that drilling in the future. My gut sense is that it'll be difficult to avoid even if we adopted a sane, comprehensive long term energy policy. But it's another thing, & won't rescue SUV dinosaurs or bring down the price. High gasoline prices & an end to the truck as family car are two absolutely necessary components of that policy. The oil billionaires & their lackeys (George has a foot in both groups) would like us to believe there's undiscovered gushers aplenty in the United States that if tapped will painlessly loosen our chains to despotic oil producing regimes abroad (we have our own despotic oil producing regime here). But we & they know these reserves would supply but a fraction of our current oil requirements. We have to curb our oil use drastically for the additional sources to matter much.
I'm a NAMBY* kind of person. But if America had a farsighted energy policy that dealt with global warming & was designed to free us from the House of Saud - a dependence that warps our foreign policy & threatens national security, if we planned for the future the way Europeans are forced to do, there's a lot I think we could accept in New Jersey that isn't now so attractive.
* Not in my backyard.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I'm not saying that we won't have to do that drilling in the future. My gut sense is that it'll be difficult to avoid even if we adopted a sane, comprehensive long term energy policy. But it's another thing, & won't rescue SUV dinosaurs or bring down the price. High gasoline prices & an end to the truck as family car are two absolutely necessary components of that policy. The oil billionaires & their lackeys (George has a foot in both groups) would like us to believe there's undiscovered gushers aplenty in the United States that if tapped will painlessly loosen our chains to despotic oil producing regimes abroad (we have our own despotic oil producing regime here). But we & they know these reserves would supply but a fraction of our current oil requirements. We have to curb our oil use drastically for the additional sources to matter much.
I'm a NAMBY* kind of person. But if America had a farsighted energy policy that dealt with global warming & was designed to free us from the House of Saud - a dependence that warps our foreign policy & threatens national security, if we planned for the future the way Europeans are forced to do, there's a lot I think we could accept in New Jersey that isn't now so attractive.
* Not in my backyard.
Labels: George W. Bush, in the news, Iraq
