With thanks to my pal ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wcg for the link, here is the story on how a West Virginia US congressman has pointed out that the oil industry, even as it whines to him and his fellow solons about how much cheaper gasoline would get if they'd just let them drill more in currently prohibited areas, is sitting on an acreage of permissible federal land the size of Colorado (!!) it has already leased for drilling and has not even used.
But all of this is beside the point, far as I'm concerned. The point is this: When a person addicted to alcohol, cocaine, heroin or other drugs is behaving self-destructively due to his/her addiction, you do not simply point them in the direction of a new source for their drug of choice. You try to help them overcome the addiction, if you can, and if you can't, at the very least avoid engaging in any sort of enabling behavior. Anyone who's been in a 12-step program (as I have) can tell you that.
As even our former-oilman President has had to admit recently, we as a nation have a monkey on our collective back...a greasy, oily, money-sucking, air-and-water-fouling, globe-warming, economy-sapping, foreign-policy-warping addiction. We need to be doing anything and everything we can to find ways other than petroleum to power our vehicles and machinery, and we've needed to do this for years, if not decades. We had the first warning back in the 1970s, with gas-station lines for miles and Congress enacting a national speed limit of 55 MPH on penalty of highway-funding withdrawal for any state that refused to honor it. Then the energy crisis subsided, the limit was repealed under Reagan in the name of "states' rights" and "free market principles," and we forgot all about the trouble as we started buying SUVs and other gas-guzzlers.
We need to be reorienting our infrastructure around alternative fuels, and working to develop and produce them nonstop: ethanol, hydrogen, biodiesel, electricity and whatever else we can come up with—anything but oil. Only when our economy is totally gasoline-free will we be free of all the unwanted side effects of petroleum dependency, of which $4+-per-gallon gas is by far the most minor. (I'm not saying we shouldn't have plastics, which I know full well come from petroleum; but our use of it should be limited to that, and we should also work on alternatives in that area.)
The answer is not more drilling. The answer is to quit—just fucking quit. Now. Maybe not cold turkey, but certainly start working toward getting rid of the habit. And after we've kicked it ourselves, we need to work on helping those emerging nations like India and China do the same.
wcg for the link, here is the story on how a West Virginia US congressman has pointed out that the oil industry, even as it whines to him and his fellow solons about how much cheaper gasoline would get if they'd just let them drill more in currently prohibited areas, is sitting on an acreage of permissible federal land the size of Colorado (!!) it has already leased for drilling and has not even used.But all of this is beside the point, far as I'm concerned. The point is this: When a person addicted to alcohol, cocaine, heroin or other drugs is behaving self-destructively due to his/her addiction, you do not simply point them in the direction of a new source for their drug of choice. You try to help them overcome the addiction, if you can, and if you can't, at the very least avoid engaging in any sort of enabling behavior. Anyone who's been in a 12-step program (as I have) can tell you that.
As even our former-oilman President has had to admit recently, we as a nation have a monkey on our collective back...a greasy, oily, money-sucking, air-and-water-fouling, globe-warming, economy-sapping, foreign-policy-warping addiction. We need to be doing anything and everything we can to find ways other than petroleum to power our vehicles and machinery, and we've needed to do this for years, if not decades. We had the first warning back in the 1970s, with gas-station lines for miles and Congress enacting a national speed limit of 55 MPH on penalty of highway-funding withdrawal for any state that refused to honor it. Then the energy crisis subsided, the limit was repealed under Reagan in the name of "states' rights" and "free market principles," and we forgot all about the trouble as we started buying SUVs and other gas-guzzlers.
We need to be reorienting our infrastructure around alternative fuels, and working to develop and produce them nonstop: ethanol, hydrogen, biodiesel, electricity and whatever else we can come up with—anything but oil. Only when our economy is totally gasoline-free will we be free of all the unwanted side effects of petroleum dependency, of which $4+-per-gallon gas is by far the most minor. (I'm not saying we shouldn't have plastics, which I know full well come from petroleum; but our use of it should be limited to that, and we should also work on alternatives in that area.)
The answer is not more drilling. The answer is to quit—just fucking quit. Now. Maybe not cold turkey, but certainly start working toward getting rid of the habit. And after we've kicked it ourselves, we need to work on helping those emerging nations like India and China do the same.
