Across Party Lines

5 Responses to Across Party Lines

1. Senior says:

   June 15, 2008 at 12:46 am

   If they started drilling today, it would still be a few months before the oil flowed and prices were affected. But since every­one would be able to know it was com­ing, much of the effort going into alter­na­tives would dissipate.

   We need to find the alter­na­tives as soon as pos­si­ble. It is likely that there will always be a need for oil for one pur­pose or another and we will one day be glad we still have oil avail­able to us.
2. Rick Beckman says:

   June 15, 2008 at 1:17 am

   Certainly alter­na­tives need to be found. One of the things Michio Kaku points out in The Physics of the Impossible is that if a civ­i­liza­tion is to be suc­cess­ful, out-​​living even its own home planet, they will even­tu­ally need to find a way to make use of close to 100% of the energy the sun pro­vides that planet.

   It’s mind bog­gling how much energy is poured upon the earth freely every day by the sun, but so lit­tle is done to make use of it.

   …

   Still, yes, drilling in America would take sev­eral months for it to affect prices, but there would still be peo­ple who are press­ing for alter­na­tives, and they’d be able to do so with­out the voices of those who are sick of $4.00 fuel in their ears.
3. Keith says:

   June 15, 2008 at 10:07 pm

   Agree!!! It’s ridicu­lous that we are pro­tect­ing an area (ANWR) that sees less than 1500 vis­i­tors a year and thereby hold­ing an entire nation hostage to mid­dle east oil.
4. Senior says:

   June 16, 2008 at 9:36 am

   It has never occurred to me that we pro­tect ANWR for the ben­e­fit of vis­i­tors. I thought we pro­tected it (and a few other places) sim­ply for the virtue of its exis­tence. That there are at least a few places on the globe that have not been directly fouled by mankind’s activ­i­ties seems worth­while to me.

   Visitors sim­ply make the job of pro­tec­tion harder.
5. Senior says:

   June 16, 2008 at 9:43 am

   “there would still be peo­ple who are press­ing for alternatives,”

   Yes. There have been peo­ple press­ing for alter­na­tives for decades, but it is only when energy prices are high that they get any real trac­tion (read $$ invested). Lots of cre­ative ideas received fund­ing in the sev­en­ties, but as soon as energy prices went back down, all of that progress stopped.

   Right now every­one wants alter­na­tives. But if the price of gas goes down, the sale of SUVs will jump in a hurry.

   There was an arti­cle in the paper yes­ter­day (or so) that dis­cussed how some man­u­fac­tur­ers are bring­ing jobs back to the US that they had sent to China because the cost of ship­ping across the Pacific was now too high. Not all con­se­quences are negative.