Burn the Oil
So America has an addiction to foreign oil. Okay. So what? Politicians talk about the addiction like it’s as bad as killing babies. Global warming concerns aside, what’s so bad about oil that we need to stop buying it?
Here are some of the top complaints people have about oil:
1. We buy oil from the Middle East!
2. We’ll run out of oil soon, and then we’ll be doomed. DOOMED, I say!
3. I can’t handle these prices [as I make this gasoline purchase]!
4. Oil pollutes!
Knee-jerk, reactionary, fear-based thinking often misses the mark. Let’s address these one at a time, shall we?
In response to number 1, the United States gets its oil from a lot of places. Can you name the country we import the most oil from? If you guessed Canada, you’re not not not wrong.
In the top five countries we import oil from, only one (Saudi Arabia, second) is Middle Eastern. We get a lot of our oil from places like Canada (most), Mexico (third), Venezuela (fourth), and Nigeria (fifth). I don’t think Canada has any complaints about that. They have an abundant natural resource that we highly value, and we pay them well for it. They get to create jobs and take in money, and we get some of that sweet sweet oil. It’s called trade, people have been doing it for centuries.
How about number 2? Are we really running out of oil? Again, Canada comes into play. This is rare for them. Canada is home to the tar sands of Alberta:
If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, entrepreneurs will find better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At $50 a barrel, it’s even profitable to recover oil that’s stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.
The Athabasca Tar Sands could sustain our addiction for quite some time. Not to mention ANWR and domestic oil supplies that hippies won’t let us tap.
The future of petroleum as a fuel remains somewhat controversial. USA Today news (2004) reports that there are 40 years of petroleum left in the ground. Some[citation needed] argue that because the total amount of petroleum is finite, the dire predictions of the 1970s[citation needed] have merely been postponed. Others[citation needed] claim that technology will continue to allow for the production of cheap hydrocarbons and that the earth has vast sources of unconventional petroleum reserves in the form of tar sands, bitumen fields and oil shale that will allow for petroleum use to continue in the future, with both the Canadian tar sands and United States shale oil deposits representing potential reserves matching existing liquid petroleum deposits worldwide.
And number 3. Gas is superexpensive right now, for a variety of reasons, one of which is the growing demand from India and China. But Americans trudge on, continue to burn their oil, until the market can no longer support the prices, demand drops, and so do prices. If we just had a government that could get out of the way, we’d have nothing to be afraid of.
If anything, wild energy prices make it more potentially profitable to find an alternative to oil in the future. After all, right now “gas-efficient” cars are more popular, so car manufacturers make them, and thereby reduce our oil consumption. See how this “free market” thing works? It’s pure beauty.
On to number 4. Oil pollutes. Okay, but you’re obviously not going to stop the global economy from burning it. But it IS finite, after all, so why not burn it all while we got it? Like ripping off a band-aid, do it all at once. Flood the market with supply, drop the prices while it still exists, and then switch to a nuclear economy and hydrogen propulsion later.
With all of this in mind, is there really anything to be afraid of? Aside from liberal politicians who keep oil supplies low and prices high? We have oil, it’s useful, and we’ll come up with something else when we run out. Let’s flood the market with oil and drop those prices. In other words, let’s burn it while we got it.
Yes, we absolutely should depend on ourselves for our own energy. But the need to replace oil will probably drive our innovation in that direction.
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