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Sunday, September 25, 2005

the coming oil crunch-some solutions

Continuing high gasoline prices are having a devastating effect upon the transportation logistics industry. Being part of this industry i have felt keenly the high cost of gasoline: here are my recommendations:
1. Open up entire Alaska North slope to drilling, period. The only people who benefit from preserving the ANWR are a tiny,tiny minority of wealthy elitist environmentalists who have the financial means of actually visiting the remote, barren Alaska North slope. The rest of us poor working smucks have to pay exorbitant gas prices due to continuing reliance upon unstable world oil supplies. The preservation of the North slope means nothing to those in the transportation/logistics business who feel the brunt of exorbitant gas prices.
2. A massive manhatten-project type plan to develop and extract oil from the oil shale sites in Utah/Colorado. There are 1.6 trillion barrels of potential oil deposits in these formations . It will involve massive imputs of energy and water resources as well as technological and environmental hurdles but i am confident that the hurdles are mainly political- if the people support extracting shale oil shale by whatever means possible then it will happen.
3. More refining capacity: cut back on environmental red-tape to expedite process and spread refining locations all around country instead of having them concentrated in a single region such as Texas-louisiana which are subject to hurricane damage.
4 Build more Nuclear power plants which are safe and environmentally friendly and can reduce use of greenhouse-causing emissions from coal.
Point of all this is to reduce U.S reliance upon overseas oil supplies in the near term future. Over the long term, say 10-15 years from now, new technologies will be fully implemented which will drastically reduce the need for gasoline in automobiles
We are headed toward a worldwide geopolitical scramble for access to and securing oil sites , and many sources are in regions with great political instability or in countries hostile to US. Oil is so crucial to the needs of Modern industrial Society that there will be continued geopolitical political power struggles over oil, and even warfare. The US needs to become as self-sufficient in oil supplies as possible or become hostage to spurts of high oil spikes. This spurt that we now have may last quite a while: if it does it will lead to a worldwide economic disruption and attendant social upheaval especailly in US and Europe .

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