In Presidents Obama's address to the nation yesterday, Feb 25, 2012, he focused entirely on energy strategy and only after pitching developing more energy sources did he (barely) mention improving efficiency. He then harped on removing tax breaks to oil companies. Nowhere in his address did he mention just plain reducing use. While he says there is "no silver bullet" to bring down oil prices, history has shown over and over that there is in fact a powerful silver bullet. Cut use and demand will go down, cut demand and prices will go down. This does NOT mean harming the economy or our quality of living, it means turning off unnecessary lights, not making unnecessary trips, not buying plastic bottles of water, etc. It simply means thinking before acting in ways that use energy and deciding whether the action is immediately necessary, could be delayed and or is not really necessary at all. With gas at $4.00 a gallon, the uproar and political speechifying is deafening. Each one could lower our own effective fuel cost to $3.60 by driving 10% fewer miles. Funny part is that if everyone drove 10% less, prices would fall - then, would everyone go back to driving more?
Even worse - The Republicans who claim there is no global warming, who think it is as American as apple pie and our "god given right" to drive Hummers and use all the energy we can pull out of the earth. Drilling as fast and furiously in the Arctic Wilderness and the Gulf of Mexico is no solution.
Feel free to comment "don't like" if the following bothers you. Gas should be $10 or more a gallon, that is what it has been in most of the world for years. If gas were in that range, maybe we would be forced to actually fix some problems rather than just delaying the fix.
nuf said
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