Aug 14, 2008
Drill, Damnit!
Our huge thunderstorm last evening knocked out power to a large group of homes, ours included. Unlike our brief two-hour inconvenience, some 1900 homes in the foothills north of our city proper are still without power and will be that way until sometime tomorrow. What a pain. As the saying goes, it sucks to be them.
I was headed to the garden center today and virtually every intersection on the way was being controlled by a policeman directing traffic because the signals are out. It took a long time to get there and to get home again.
As I drove to the center I was flipping through the radio channels when something caught my ear. It was a rant about oil and oil drilling.
The guy on the radio was ridiculing Obama for saying that he wanted to get the nation off oil. The speaker's point was that getting us off oil is impossible because many consumer products contain oil and oil derivatives. He was saying that even if every car was converted to an alternate fuel, we would still need five million barrels of oil per day.
My response would be, "So"?
Our daily consumption of oil is about 21,000,000 barrels per day. Even if Obama is 75% wrong, we would still reduce consumption by 5,000,000 barrels per day. If you are keeping score at home, that is six hundred million dollars a day in oil we would not be importing. Only a jackass could find fault with the goal of drastically reducing oil consumption.
Of course, the solution in the eyes of supply side crowd is to drill more. The reason that this won't work is that many countries are rapidly increasing oil consumption. China uses only about 6,000,000 barrels a day. Does anyone think that their consumption will fall? They have five times our population for Pete's sake. They will require as much oil as can be brought to market.
It is way past time to innovate our way out of the morass, not drill our way out.
Not to brag or anything, but Daughter Sneed is teaching a psychology class at a local college. Her first class was today and she said it went well. How did a moron like me get a bunch of smart kids?
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky
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6 comments:
Remember the gas lines in the 70s and Carter getting pissed on 'cause he asked people to conserve, or something like that?
Why did Brazil start there road to oil independence then and have done so within the past few years finally?
And why haven't any of these, using your words, "morons" in DC ever start doing anything before and only start talking about doing anything now?
We're a stupid country, filled with sound bites to make people feel like somethings going to be done!
; (
Good Morning BTW! ; )
Mr. Coffee - Congresspeople are anything but morons.
As are you, Merle. In your family, the apples do not fall fall from the tree. Of course your daughter is smart! For heaven's sake!
You're absolutely right, Merle. Conserving anything is better than conserving nothing. But you know how it is -- Americans hate to be asked to cut back.
I think the market is actually solving our energy problem by driving petroleum prices sky-high. People will be FORCED to conserve. Drilling sounds like an easy answer, but as you said, it's no solution.
I read an article (or maybe it was one of your posts) about why people don't understand large numbers. It isn't because they're stupid; they just don't have any concrete way to picture large numbers. So it's easy to make it sound like Obama's plan will do nothing.
@ Kurt - It's that pesky New Math.
i like daughter Sneed.
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