Conservative Blog

In my Yugo (covered in the feathers of dead baby ducks), I felt I could understand and even sympathize with the theory behind being squashed. The best, fastest and, perhaps, only current solution is to drill for more oil and to build refineries and (cover your ears liberals) new nuclear power plants. However, I don't think this is going to happen in the current political climate, and I don't see a change in the weather soon. In fact, as I predict we will see over the next few years, the whole global warming thing will be largely proven false, and yet the cacophony of caterwauling, hairy-legged California women squeezing their bare breasts against the nearest endangered tree is only going to get louder. Liberalism requires no logic, after all. It only requires a sense of "the greater good".

And this is important for two reasons: China and India. In these two, still growing, countries reside populations of nearly 3 billion. Nearly 2 billion of those meet the non-financial requirements for car ownership, but the vast majority don't have the economic ability to acquire a car. But the times, they are a changin'. As their economies continue to grow by leaps and bounds and corporations find it useful to "reinvent" the car for the lower income populaces (as is already happening), there are going to be vastly more people on the oriental highway in any given day than there will be on all the U.S. roads in a month. We're not talking $150 for a barrel of oil; we're talking $2000 for a barrel of oil.

Yes, we damn sure need to be drilling every ounce we can find, but we also need to be proactively doing what Americans have always done: we need to lead the way with new solutions. Not because we want carbon footprints as petite and lovely as Cinderella's, but because we don't really have any choice. Perhaps things can be better briefly, but the long term outlook is grim. As the world economy lifts Asian, Eastern European and African nations to industrial status, let's let them use the oil while we pioneer cheap hydrogen. Or we can pay $40 per gallon at the pump.

I suppose we could nationalize our oil companies. We could take them all over and start drilling everywhere and only sell to American refineries and that would last us a while. But if we don't nationalize these companies, they'll just sell the oil in the general market and as the demand continues to increase, so will the prices. And, in any event, I'm not a fan of nationalizing the oil industry. That leaves me with two actions to take: conserve and research.