Maybe it's appropriate that Halloween is coming up. Here's Sarah Palin speaking in Alaska, with a crowd of 5,000 people chanting "drill, baby, drill!" BTW, Alaskans share oil revenues, so they are in it for the $$, and damn the environment! Either way, one of the most beautiful states in the union (and critical habitat) will be ruined if these idiots get their way:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26693683/
Watch them try to drill in ANWR if McCain/Palin get elected. Conversely, there's a boatload of oil in North Dakota we haven't tapped yet:
http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/The_U.S._Poised_to_hit_New_Oil_Gusher_080317.html
Not to mention there's a huge find already being worked in Canada. Odd that they never seem to want to mention that! It's all about drilling in ANWR, or offshore (where you will interrupt shipping lanes, tourism, and commercial fishing, not to mention the possible environmental impact). Drilling in ANWR itself would be an environmental nightmare, but if you ask the Governor of Alaska she's perfectly fine with environmental destruction. But then, according to her polar bears are not in distress.
I was surprised to find that many gas stations were already running out of fuel this Saturday and if you could find gas it was outrageously expensive. The issue wasn't that there was no crude oil available -- it was the disruption in the pipelines caused by these massive storms (which are worsened by climate change, by the way). We could find all the oil in the world tomorrow, but our storage areas and our refineries are already at capacity, and the pipeline issue comes up every hurricane season. I've said all along this is NOT a supply issue, we have all the crude we can handle. This is a DEMAND issue. We've already seen in the last few months that the price of gasoline dropped only when the demand dropped, when people started buying more fuel-efficient cars and taking public transportation. If people go back to driving gas hogs the price of gasoline will go up again. If you want the price of gasoline to continue to fall, we need to continue to lessen the DEMAND.
Remember, the price of crude oil is set on a global market; we could find boatloads of it here in the U.S. and it wouldn't affect how much Americans pay for gasoline, we would just have a bigger share of the profits. Or, I should say, the American oil companies would.
The solution is not "drill, baby, drill." It is "alternative fuels, baby, alternative fuels!"
