The Fallacy that is US Oil Independence

Our four-part plan for energy “independence”:

1. Open up northern Alaska to oil exploration and exploit it to the fullest. This of course would come at the expense of a few wandering environmentalist also know locally as the rabid-caribou.

2. Expand off shore drilling throughout the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the US. Surely, the millions of hormonally overcharged US beach goers in their gas thirsty over sized cars and SUVs would appreciate the necessity of the new views and what may eventually float ashore while they are bathing.

3. Invest in new domestic refineries and the expansion of existing production facilities to process all that new US domestic crude oil. For anyone who has driven along the a New Jersey section of the US 95, affectionately called by its colonial-era name “the turnpike”, adding more capacity to those refineries wouldn’t make surrounding air any more toxic than it already is – and what is that smell anyway.

4. Expand the use of alternative and renewable energies like: nuclear (the US can export the nuclear waste to Mexico since the majority of its population is moving to the US anyway); wind power (even the coast of Martha’s Vineyard is an ideal location in spite of the objections of US Senator Kennedy who unashamedly promotes that technology everywhere but not in his back yard); and, of course there is always that darling of global warming protagonists – solar power (since global warming produces more sunshine everywhere, this may even be commercially viable in Martha’s Vineyard).

The result of all this after five years or even ten years on the dependence US has on oil obliviously is none. Perhaps less obvious is that the result on the US dependence or, as the US President Bush says, the “US addiction” on foreign oil imports would be negligible. That right! The hard truth of the matter, as anyone remotely familiar with the oil industry will tell you, is that nearly 80% of all the oil imported into the US is used for transportation, principally consumer automobiles. Therefore it stands to reason that until there is a readily available alternative fuel source for the nearly 230 million cars, buses and trucks on the US highways, nothing…NOTHING…changes with respect to the US dependence on foreign oil and, by definition, its polices regarding the middle east and increasingly western Africa.