The Senate narrowly passed a budget resolution Thursday that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, setting up another showdown in Congress this year over the most fought-over piece of land in America. Republican leaders approved the measure 51-49 after securing the vote of Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, by offering up to $10 billion in projected revenues from drilling in the Alaskan refuge and in offshore waters to rebuild the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast.
I ask you, what are we going to do when we run out of oil? Is your life sustainable? Mine sure isn't.
2 comments:
Hi hon!
ANWR is such a red herring anyway (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4542853/), much like that CNN program last monday. The fact is, ANWR will yield somewhere between 0.6 to 10 Billion Barrels of oil. Sounds like a lot huh? But the world burns through a Billion barrels of oil every 11 days! The USA every month or so.. It won't even cover the rate at which US oil is depleting. e.g. the much larger Prudhoe Bay oil that came online in Alaska in the eighties made no dent on US oil production decline which peaked at 11million barrels a day in 1971. It is currently 4-5m a day including 1.5m from Prudhoe bay. It is an environmental issue but the argument used is that it will help reduce imported oil. But it won't. It will offset a tiny amount of depletion that's all. The US will still need 15+ million barrels a day from abroad - getting that will be challenging enough. Oil is finished and no one is talking about it, which brings me back to that CNN program: they wrapped peakoil in Hurricanes, Terrorism and a like. None of that needs to happen and peakoil is still a reality. The world is producing 84million barrels a day. The evidence is clear: it cannot produce any more and will now produce less every year. There is no more oil to find in the world to even maintain that rate let alone expand it: yet if China alone owned cars at the western rate they would require 99million barrels a day just for themselves and then there's india, etc.... No one in the US mainstream media wants to talk about the real issue: we have used up a precious and unique resource to the point that it can no longer expand to meet demand and we have built a world that needs oil for farming, food, water, transport, trade, pharmaceuticals, heating, materials and so on - it all has to be cloaked in fantasy hurricanes and terrorism or recourse to fantasy Alaskan oil that is a drop in the ocean. Or the ethanol fantasy (we can grow enough ethanol for fuel as long as we are prepared to starve to death - what's it going to be: food or fuel??). As Jim Kunstler says in his book the Long Emergency: "President Carter told the American People the truth about energy and they hated him for it". Europe and Japan disconnected economic growth from oil after the 70's, the USA didn't. But we will all suffer however the most oil dependent will suffer the most. I can live without a car where I live but what about food, water, a job, my house. The billions of the world's poor want lives like we have, just at the moment we have exhausted our poor planet of the resources that gave us those lives. This is reality: tell your friends.
The only problem, Al, is that most people don't believe this is happening. And if one runs on to long about it, it is un-American. As our brilliant Cheney says, the American way of life is non-negotiable. We get to be energy pigs and boastful and falsely superior under the guise of patriotism.
It really makes me sick.
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