Where Is the Outrage?

Published in the Lynchburg Ledger on March 11, 2011 

When Barack H. Obama took office in 2009, the price of gas at the pump was $1.95 a gallon.  As of last Tuesday, the national average is $3.52, an increase of 81 percent.  With the price of crude oil on the rise due to the unrest in the Middle East, we could easily see $4.00 gas by Easter and $5.00 gas by Memorial Day.

So where is the outrage from the mainstream media?  You know if this happened during a Republican administration, the media would be on the warpath and demanding the government do something.

Well, it is the government doing something, that is partially responsible for the high prices.  What they are doing is preventing our vast domestic sources of oil to be tapped.  We need to revive “Drill Baby, Drill” but because of all the hype over the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we are drilling less, not more.

Obama still has a hold on drilling in the Gulf in spite of a court ruling against him. The administration late last Friday appealed a judge’s orders directing the Interior Department to act on several pending Gulf Coast deep-water drilling permits.  Meanwhile, many of the drilling rigs have departed for more friendly locations, costing Louisiana some 30,000 jobs.

It is not as if we haven’t had a warning.  As far back as 1973 when the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) proclaimed an oil embargo against the U.S in response to our support for Israel, we knew we were vulnerable.

For 38 years, we have heard talk about becoming energy independent, all the while becoming more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil.  The problem is not technical, it is political, specifically the left-wing, environmental wacko type of political opposition.

On Feb 16, 2011, President Obama declared oil was the “fuel of the past “without really being specific as to what the “fuel of the future” might be.  Sure, he talked about alternate sources, but they will never meet our needs and he knows it.  I believe he actually wants $5.00 per gallon gas because it is not energy independence he wants, but behavior modification.

When it comes to energy, there are only three sources on earth: solar, lunar and nuclear.  All energy can be put into one of the three categories.

The least obvious is lunar power, the gravitational pull the moon has on the seas causing tides.  I see some TV commercials talking about harnessing the tides to generate electricity.  You would need specific areas where tides are abnormally high, such as in the Bay of Fundy.  Each day 100 billion tons of seawater flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy during one tide cycle.  That would be fine as long as you didn’t need any power during the two low and high tides in every day. 

That is the problem, having energy available in the quantities you need, when you need it.

The second in nuclear power which produces about 13-14 percent of the world’s energy needs.  Where France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy, the US derives only 20 percent of our total electric power from nuclear.  We currently have 104 nuclear reactors on line producing 799 billion kilowatt hours of power.

The US has not built a new nuclear power plant for the past 30 years.  The accident at Three Mile Island, which injured nobody, gave the environmental wacko’s all the ammunition they needed to pull the plug on nuclear.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy currently operated approximately 150 nuclear powered ships and has done so safely for years.

One of the problems with nuclear is the storage of spent fuel rods.  Again, this is not a technical problem but a political one.  A depository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada is all ready to accept spent fuel rods but Democrat Harry Reid has blocked that for years.

Finally there is solar energy, by far the biggest source. 

Usually when we hear the term solar, we think of a bank of photovoltaic cells that generate electricity when exposed to sunlight.  However, every other form of energy we use is part of the solar family.

Wind energy is solar.  The sun is the only cause of our climate.  It created areas of high and low pressure and winds are generated as the high pressure winds flow towards low pressure areas.

Hydroelectric power is also solar.  The sun evaporated the water from the seas and it falls back to earth in the form of precipitation at higher elevations.  Power is generated as this water attempts to flow back to the sea under the force of gravity.  This is called a “renewable” form of energy and we get about 10 percent of our power from hydroelectric.  All the potential dam sights have been developed so there will be no expansion in this form of energy generation.

Bio-fuels are also solar, without the sun, nothing will grow.

Finally, oil, gas, wood and coal are forms of stored solar energy.  They were all living organisms at one time, dependent on the sun.

We get about 50 percent of our electric power from coal and 20 percent from natural gas.

Oil produces the fuel we need for transportation because it is easily stored, converted and transported.  The US has sufficient reserves to last for at least 100 more years.  I remember back in the ‘70’s, the predictions were we would run out of oil by 2000.

In 1995, Congress passed legislation to open ANWR to drilling, but “William the Impeached” veto’s it.  Since then, the Democrats have blocked just about every attempt to develop domestic sources of oil.

Petroleum is the fuel of the past, but it is also the fuel of the present and the future.  If we don’t kick these liberal Democrats out of office in 2012 and begin developing our own oil and gas reserves as well as opening up more coal mining, in a very short period of time $5 gas will seem like a bargain.