10 May 2008

About the Price of Gas

Kevin O'Brien nails it:

We, and our political representatives, have let ourselves get talked out of drilling for our own oil because doing so might scare the fish and inconvenience the caribou. Sitting under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 10 billion barrels of oil. That's about 15 years worth of imports from Saudi Arabia. And it will continue to sit until we begin to prize our freedom of movement more than the caribou's.

We've let ourselves get talked out of a lot of oil refining capacity, because refineries are yucky. We've let ourselves get talked into producing all kinds of exotic mixtures of gasoline, sold according to season, that drive up prices of both food and fuel. And while we feed corn to our gas tanks, food riots break out elsewhere. (Caribou steaks, anyone?) Now the eco-warriors and the big corporations (aren't we supposed to hate them?) that stand to profit (aren't we supposed to hate people who make money?) from getting picked by government as winners in the "renewable" energy sweepstakes want to talk us into raising consumer costs even more - a lot more.
Read it all and then glance in the mirror.

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