by Barry Girolamo

Created on: August 03, 2008   Last Updated: August 08, 2008

You can't fight "Mother Nature", and to try to shoulder the responsibility of global climate changes on the President of the United States is absurd. The earth has been warming since the end of the ice age, which is millions of years, and that is a fact, and it has nothing to do with presidential policy. Who wrote this question, Al Gore?

What has to be one of the priorities of the next administration is to try to work towards making our country more energy independent. The question here should be, "How can the next President and his staff help the country shift our dependence on foreign oil, and lead our country into becoming energy self sufficient?" As a nation, we should have been working on this for the last forty years, and there are many things we can do right now to start the process.

Our country runs on petroleum, and it would be impossible to suddenly stop using oil. The computer you are using right now is mostly a petroleum product. All plastics are produced from oil. How many things in your home can you think of that do not have some plastic in them? All of your appliances have plastic parts, your television has a lot of plastic, and so do all of your phones. Your house may have vinyl siding on it, another petroleum product. We could not exist or manufacture anything without petroleum. Our cars and trucks all run on petroleum products in the form of gasoline and diesel. Even the handful of electric vehicles in the country which run on batteries need to be charged by producing electricity by the way of burning petroleum products. Trying to switch to ethanol doesn't work because of the expense of producing it, and at the same time it raises food costs. We're trying to burn in our cars what normally would be a food staple.

So how do we solve the problem of dependence on foreign oil? The answer will come from technological developments, an area in which this country has always led the way. In the short term, we must maximize the oil reserves which are available to us right here in this country, and off our own shores. Wouldn't it be much better for us to extract our own oil in a much cleaner and safer manner than importing it from other countries? It's just common sense. We will continue to need oil in the foreseeable future, so why not use resources available to us within our own country? We can do it better and cleaner than any other country, making for a much cleaner environment for the entire world. It would also ease the strangle hold which we now find

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>