American industry and politicians continue to pursue a twisted idea that we can reduce our dependence on fossil energy with, well, more fossil energy!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR2008061103948.html

Everyone wants a quick fix to the "problem" of high fuel prices, and the current administration along with many of the "conservatives" believe that more oil is the way to solve the dependence on oil.

It's like trying to break a heroin addiction with more heroin.

Lower Prices = Increased Consumption = More automobile dependence + Growing Economy + More Consumerism = Greater cliff to fall off when our "new" oil reserves start running dry

Our fuel price "problem" is creating a lot of solutions. I am seeing more and more motorcycles and scooters in parking lots, more carpooling, and many more smaller vehicles on the roads. People are finally getting the hint, thinking about their consumption, and changing the way they do things. That's what we need - not more fossil energy! Everyone talks about getting off of foreign oil, but no one does anything - they just drive off in their SUVs and believe that they can't do anything about it. Everyone wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but again, they just crank up the air conditioning to 68° and believe there's nothing we can do as individuals... High prices are actually causing the opposite, and they are causing people to do things that they would never even think about doing before.

It seems that our leaders and citizens who are pushing for more oil supply seem to have forgotten the following:

• That it takes years for new oil production to come online.
• That nine billion barrels of oil is enough to fuel our wonderful transportation system for about six months, and that we cannot extract all nine billion barrels at any rate we please.
• That going to remote corners of the world to extract fossil fuels is a waste of time and money when we have truly efficient and renewable options right here at home.
• Is there even any good light sweet crude left?
• That they bash the EROEI of ethanol (which really is not good, I will agree there), then promote such low-EROEI and even more environmentally-destructive options as oil sands, oil shale, heavy oil - essentially trying to make gasoline from tar. It takes energy to break molecular bonds - cracking those big tar molecules into lovely little gasoline molecules comes at a price.
• I guess they could gasify the tar, into syngas, then convert it to diesel via Fischer-Tropsch. It costs billions and billions of dollars to build such a facility! Billions of dollars better spent elsewhere on truly renewable options - not trying to sustain filthy internal combustion with unsustainable resources.
• That barges full of "sour crude" sitting in Iran's harbors do not represent a "supply glut." They call it "sour" for a reason.

It is a shame that the $17-billion or so in tax breaks over 10 years which are received by the petroleum industry will continue, as the energy bill which would have repealed them was not passed. On TV we had the big-shots saying "I studied business, and I know how businesses treat taxes - as a cost which gets passed on to the consumer (customer)."

I do know that what he describes is exactly true - repealing those tax breaks and diverting them towards renewable energy would DOUBLE the amount of subsidies going to renewable energy (See the DOE 2008 Budget Request to Congress ) and at the same time might increase the cost of a gallon of gas by a few tenths of a cent, seeing that when we divide the 1.7 billion dollars per year in would-have-been lost tax breaks by the nearly 145 billion gallons of gasoline consumed in this country per year, we see that it is equivalent to about a penny per gallon. On top of that, gasoline only accounts for half of all oil products, so the real number would be much less than that - less than half a cent. Big Whoop - people throw that kind of change into the fountains at their local monuments to consumerism (the mall).