1. More oil will not lead to cheaper gas. Our oil refineries, which turn oil into gas, are maxed out. Oil companies have been closing them, and none have been opening. Even if we had a lot more oil, we could not product much more gasoline and this is why the prices of gasoline are so high.
2. Even if oil companies choose to drill offshore (and most won't) the oil won't be produced for at least 5-10 years, so there is no short-term fix.
3. We are now hearing about shale rock in the Rocky Mountains, which could outproduce Saudi Arabia.
Oil shale, offshore drilling, and arctic wildlife refuge drilling are not the answers. Everytime we burn some type of fossil fuel, we are slowly fucking over the world. We have seen changes in our lifetimes, which are comparatively small to the 5 billion years that our Earth has been here. We've done so much damage that ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic is melting at a rate that has never been seen. While I disagree that our coastal cities will be flooded soon, it is not outside of the realm of possibilities.
We need to harness cleaner form of energies such as wind power, an idea advocated by an oil man, T Boone Pickens. See www.pickensplan.com
4 comments:
I agree that cleaner forms of energy are needed, but at this time, drilling should occur to try to lower prices. There's sources in the US where we can find gas. I say give it a shot.
The problem with this is that it will take many years for any drilling to have an effect on prices, and then there's the simple fact that we are maxed out in terms of gas making capacity as the refineries could not handle any more.
In 5 years we could have some viable alternatives. Its not worth screwing up the planet to make gas $1 cheaper.
We can keep drilling until another alternative comes along. Then we can stop. I still think there's gasoline out there. We need to find it.
Sure, oil is out there, but we still can't turn it into gas. And even if we can, its not worth the future cost.
We need to stop drilling new holes now. The ice caps are already meling more than they have in the last 1000's of years. I think that $5-$10/gas is the only way to get companies to start looking at alternative fuel sources anyway, which is good in the long term.
We should stop depleting every resource we find. Just like fishing, eventually there will be more fish if we keep going on at current rates.
Post a Comment