Oil Futile? Oh, really!

Please! A dose of reality here. Some comments to my previous blog on drilling in ANWR, and elsewhere the U.S. has known and untapped oil reserves, border on purposeful avoidance of reality and common sense. I agree alternative fueled vehicles are the answer, a decade or more from now. But, we are living in the “now,” and oil is the only possible answer for the immediate “now.”

Some of you argue oil is futile, saying if we are to ever be energy independent again we must not ever search or pump our own oil again, suck up the high prices the Saudis force down our throat (you say) and get those alternative energy sources on line. What a stellar idea. Only hitch is those alternative sources, like my favorite hydrogen powered cars, are at least 10 years from perfection and production! Anti oil friends, did you get that, 10 years away, at least. In the meantime, how do you like $5.00 per gallon, or more? That’s coming soon, if we don’t take a more rational and realistic approach.

As we approach that $5.00 a gallon some of you say we can stomach while we wait for alternative fuel sources to be perfected and produced, you might want to check what these high fuel prices (especially diesel) are doing to the economy. Where do you think the research dollars come from? If the economy is in the tank, guess what, research goes the same way.

Hybrids are getting better, but they are no where near a rational alternative for places like Texas and California, where mass transit is still far from being capable of carrying even a fraction of our work force to their jobs. Those who suggest “parking our Escalades, beaching our yachts and turning out the lights at car dealerships” are living in la-la land. Give that a try and tell me how that works out for those of you who live 30 minutes from work, with no bus, rail or Star Trek transporter available. By the way, there are not enough Escalades and yachts on the face of the earth to even register a blip on the “make a difference” Richter scale.

Reality. We can drill, in an environmentally friendly way, in ANWR right now, one of the largest known untapped oil reserves on the face of the earth, and it is ours! We can do the similar environmentally sound ways off the Pacific, Gulf and Atlantic coasts, where guess what, there is more oil than we are getting now from the Saudis. The oil industry experts I have talked to say we can do that drilling almost immediately. The impact would also be almost immediate. We can almost immediately expand current refineries and get them ginned up for that additional oil from our own reserves. These are immediate, we can do now remedies.

Let us do that, get the economy back on the tracks and get our attitudes adjusted, while we pursue a “Manhattan Project” style collaborative research and development project to get hydrogen, solar electric or whatever other alternative energy source perfected and to market. Maybe we can’t beat that 10 year to market prediction, I hope so, but we need the oil profits and a healthy economy available to finance the research to get there.