Electricity comes from…thin air…and oil!

It would seem that the Democrats believe that electricity comes from thin air. They continue to pick winners and losers in this energy crisis. They have obviously decided that oil and natural gas, stagnant in the ground, is the loser and electricity and food for energy is the winner.
I simply do not understand it. Oil sits in the ground. Trillions of barrels of it already discovered and recoverable, but we do not want to get at it. I understand we do not want to use it all but even the amounts we have already found will last us 50+ years.

So instead we are to change over to electric cars. Electricity generated predominantly by lovely, clean burning COAL. Can’t generate it via nuclear, too dangerous; Solar, too inefficient; Hyrdo, too destructive to those fish. Well if those are out of reasch we can always generate electricity by burning heating oil.

But we can also go after that other green technology, FOOD. So we do not burn oil buried in the ground, used for nothing else, but we burn food. We take fertile soil, clean water, farm equipment [what does that run on?], trucks, trains and processing plants to turn food into a liquid that we can burn. Yeah that makes sense.

Then we wonder why the price of food goes up and why the poorest of the poor go hungry. The term “you reep what you sew” has never been more literal [or did I mean to say liberal].

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60% dependant on foreign oil is not acceptable.

We do not need to “lessen our dependence on foreign oil” we need to “eliminate” our dependence on foreign oil. These dribs and drabs of 5% here and 3% there are useless and only serve to distract from the problem. Politicians want you to believe that they are doing something. Moving from 70% dependent to 60% dependent is progress but of little long term value.

I have learned enough from politicians and business to know that when setting goals you should always aim high. You may not succeed but you are guaranteed to do better than if you set lower goals. I expect that the 10% goal of our current politicians will end up being 5% and deemed a huge success. I say aim higher. Aim for 100% US production. Yeah we may not get there but we will get far closer then hoping for a few percentage points here and there.

Drill off Florida, Texas and California. Drill in that postage stamp inside ANWAR and get moving on that shale from the Rocky Mountains. Increase Nuclear, Wind and Hydro power. Pursue new technologies. None of these alone will make up the 70% short-fall. T. Boone Picken’s plan aims for 20% wind power. OK, that helps and we still have 50% to go. If we all inflate our tires as Obama would suggest that can get us 3-5% more. Still leaving 45% that has to come from somewhere.

When you set the proper goal it is easier to see that none of these are the right answer, all of them are. Let’s get moving.