FILL IT UP AND CHECK THE OIL

I am a person who follows current events and the political happenings. There are times when you get bogged down in one single area that prevents you from keeping up with the crowd. The “energy crises” is one of those potholes I encountered along the way. I have thought, calculated and pondered this situation and now I am going to try to straighten it out for you.

 

Experts tell us that the oil we get from the Middle East is not going to last forever, that it will soon be depleted and other oil reserves are not abundant enough to allow us to continue using it at our present rate. The experts say, “Undiscovered reserves are minimal at best”. That is sure not good news to say the least, however other experts say that the unknown reserves mount into hundreds of billions of barrels that are there just for the taking. Do we or don’t we?

 

I’ll go with those who say we are running out.  Seems some political types who live in the corn belt have been frightened to death by the experts and are heading full speed ahead to digest all that Iowa and Illinois corn into ethanol. Pour the corn in the gasoline tanks of our autos, or are they corn tanks? What ever you call them they will gobble up our food supply, wear out the land and provide a puny fuel that delivers less energy per gallon than gasoline and requires almost as much energy to produce as it finally delivers on the highway. I know you think this is a poor investment, but it must be a good investment because the government subsidizes it. Corn farmers deposit their profits in banks that are failing and can afford automobiles manufactured by the government. A plus if I ever saw one.

 

Leaving the field we have to fill a whole bunch of energy needs as well. We need to heat our houses, light our homes, offices, streets and highways. We need energy to operate our manufacturing plants that are left but that takes more corn than we can grow. There is a lot of coal that we might burn to make electricity but that is almost a cardinal sin to even consider the dirty stuff. Forget it and let’s opt for some high efficiency and clean power. Nuclear power, oops I said that? Not on your life it’s dangerous, and unsafe at any speed. I then turned to wind power. Yep we do see some of those humongous behemoths turning in the slightest breeze around the country but that technology will not catch on. The only steady wind is in Washington and in most other areas it is only spotty. The cost to benefit ratio is lousy not to mention the environmental problems they cause. They cast a shadow on surrounding homes, make a swooshing sound that is undesirable and nearsighted birds have been known to meet their demise upon contact with those whirling blades. Looks like we may be running short of ideas, but don’t panic our government has appointed a Czar to iron out the kinks.

 

 

I examined hydrogen as a power source because it the most plentiful gas on the planet.  I thought I had really hit on the all time resolution of this perplexing problem. To my chagrin I discovered that others had already explored this source of power and found it to be to costly, to heavy and too dangerous. I had almost given up then I stumbled upon something that might work.

 

Let’s assume that we continue buying Arab oil paying whatever they decide to charge in desert dollars. Sooner or later they will run out according to the “experts” and that would drive the price of oil is high enough to encourage exploration in other areas. Not a bad plan.  The Middle East would become a customer and not a provider and our oil dollars would start flowing in the other direction.

 

There is a system that is working as we ponder all these crazy ideas. The free market system. Sooner or later the price of energy will provide the incentive for the real innovators to find alternatives that work and are affordable. This system in America has worked wonders for two hundred years. Taxpayers did not pay for the telephone, steam engine or the light bulb and they don’t need to buy corn.