Lets face it, our economy is in the tank and the American people are being pinched tighter and tighter each day. I never thought I’d yearn for the days when gasoline was a mere $1.50 a gallon, but now that I’m paying $4.05 a gallon and the predictions are that the price will be $5.00 on average before the middle of summer, I am doing just that. The reasons for this crunch aren’t all obvious ones. It is unfortunate for us that because of maneuvering by lawmakers and businessmen over the last fifty years or more our economy is set up much like a house of cards. This is the situation we find ourselves and it is only going to get worse. But the energy crisis and the results do not have to be an extinction level event. If we use our brains and act now we can survive and thrive on Earth, post-peak oil.

Sure it sounds like doom and gloom but like any addict will tell you, you must hit rock bottom before you can make any substantive change and America just isn’t at rock bottom yet. We’ve been through a lot together since the golden years of the 90’s: 9/11, floods, wild fires, massive hurricanes, earth quakes, climate change, war on two different fronts. Now we not only have to deal with the very real threats of Peak Oil and Global Warming, but the excessive greed of the oil and warmongering industries as well? The number of horrible occurrences and disasters seem overwhelming and hopeless to the average citizen. We have known that this crisis was coming since the 70’s, and yet neither our government nor the private sector has made any real adjustments to fix it. All we’ve done so far is kick the problem a little father up the road. It’s up us to fix things, not ten or twenty or thirty years down the road, but right now. The problem is the enormity of the task - it is as though the problems are so big that no one can possibly make the slightest dent.

But all hope is not lost. We as a society must realize that the energy crisis is more than just an extreme inconvenience precipitated by market forces and basic economics and less than an extinction level event brought on by our own hands. We can make the changes necessary to not only save our species and our planet but to thrive as we once did. What is required for that is knowledge, public awareness, information, and of course hard work. That’s right America, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves, get your fat backside off the couch and do something. If our parents and grandparents could survive the Depression and two world wars then we can survive this. We have to. Because if we don’t, there won’t be much of a world to give to our children.

The following article will contain a bullet point based list of precisely why drilling in ANWR and in our coastal areas will not solve our energy problems. Read it, print it out and carry it with you and any time you hear some jerk on CSPAN or on the news going on about how the only solution to the crisis is to drill in ANWR, pull the sheet out and let them have it.

To understand and deal with a problem you first have to define the problem. So, what is our current problem?

Now, a lot of people have had a lot of suggestions on how to fix our problem. Those on the right side of the aisle seem to uniformly blame the ‘Democratic Majority’ in Congress, even though the slim majority the Democrats have has only been in power for two years and prices started rising before that. Furthermore, every time the ‘Democratic Majority’ attempts a fix they are blocked by Republican obstructionists. Those on the left of the aisle seem to blame the fact that the Republicans have held a majority in Congress for the last twelve years leading up to the last mid term elections, and the White House for the last eight years, and say that since the problem predated the ‘Democratic Majority’, that the Republicans are at fault. We’ve known about the problem of our reliance on oil in general and foreign oil in particular since the 1970’s and the Republicans have not taken the slightest action to prevent, or lessen our current crisis. Indeed many of them have actually been working against the needs of their constituents and our nation in order to side with Big Oil in the form of subsidies and legislation that favors them. Each side is pointing to the finger at the other and our nation is caught in the middle, being squeezed for every last dollar.

Unfortunately the solutions to our problems are not simple, nor are they short term. We cannot wave a magic wand and suddenly have everything work out just fine. This crisis has been decades in the making and it will not be undone in just a few months.

To answer the question of how do we fix this problem, the first thing you will need to know is some boring statistics but they are highly relevant to what is currently going on in the world as far as our energy consumption and use. I will divide the data into (hopefully) easy to reference and informative chunks in the form of questions each one containing a link to where I got the answer from. Much of the following data comes from the US Energy Information Agency, created by Congress in 1977 to collect statistics for the US Department of Energy. Its mission is to provide policy-neutral data, forecasts, analysis in order to promote sound policy making, efficient markets and public understanding of energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment.

First Question: How many gallons of gas does one barrel of oil make? How much gas does an average passenger car use?
Answer:

To put that in perspective, my vehicle’s gas tank is 19 gallons. So to fill up my tank with finished gasoline takes one full barrel of oil. Now this is not to say that the remainder of the barrel isn’t used. On the contrary,the rest of the crude makes distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, jet fuel, kerosene and even the components for asphalt. But that is not what we as consumers are in general concerned with right now. Want more information?: What fuels are made from Crude oil?

Second Question: What is the current consumption of oil?

So, what we gain from the above information is that America consumes roughly one out of every four barrels of oil produced in the world. Our refining capacity is significantly less than our consumption and that we import over half of our total consumed oil from foreign countries.

Third Question: Is there enough oil to meet our future needs?
Answer: No

What this information tells us, is that over time the price of oil will not go down. Though we might perhaps see some minor reduction in the short term, over the long term the price will continue to rise. Currently a large percentage of the oil price is caused by oil speculation, deliberate manipulation of supply, and the restriction of refining capacity. Even if we were to remove, for example, the Federal Gas Tax and the effects of speculators from the equation, the simple forces of basic economics will cause it to increase over time as supplies of easily obtainable oil diminish. What this very clearly says is that anything we do right now, is only going to apply a bandage to the problem, while what our world needs in order to survive is more akin to to the removal of a cancerous tumor on the heart.

Fourth Question: Will drilling in ANWR and in our coastal areas fix this?
Answer: No

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge controversy was unintentionally created by the US Geological Survey in 1998 when they examined the area. They published a report stating that with a 95% certainty that there could be about 4.3 billion barrels of oil in ANWR that are technically recoverable. Drilling in this area has been debated since the first Carter administration but ultimately it is still speculation since no one has actually drilled to find out.

With 4.2 billion barrels of theoretical oil to recover, we could set up an operation to pull 1,000,000 barrels of oil out of the ground each day (which is about equal to what we import from Venezuela) for refining. But at that rate of extraction, ANWR would be completely dry within about twelve years.

To complicate this further, you will note above that our current refinery capacity is a mere 17,443,492 barrels per day. As of January of 2007 there are 149 refineries in the United States, most of which are operating at 90% capacity or above. Which means that even if we were to tap ANWR and our coastal areas for oil we have no place to refine it. So in the short term, we would have to pay some foreign entity to refine the oil to gas for us. We would have to pay to have the oil shipped from where we extracted it to the refiner and then either pay to have it shipped back or sell it on the open world market. All of this extra transportation of the oil will not reduce the price in the slightest.

Additionally, in order to extract oil from many of these areas, drillships, which are specially modified tankers equipped for drilling in deep water will need to be used, and there are a limited number of drillships available. According to the article ‘Death of Deep-Sea Drilling Ships Hinders Offshore Oil Search by the NY Times, all currently existing tanker ships are booked solid for five years due to the current demand for oil. New ships can be built of course, but there are only a few companies capable of making them at the cost of about a half billion each and several years to build.

Something that should also be mentioned here, according to the article ‘W.Va Congressman pushing oil companies to start drilling unused land’ in the Charleston Daily Mail. Oil companies are currently sitting on 68 million acres of land leased from the Federal Government on which they are permitted to drill and could be used to gain an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil a day without having to tap any new fields or drill in restricted lands. This 4.8 million barrels a day would fill our current oil deficit, reduce our reliance on foreign oil by a third and give us much needed breathing room. Drilling in these already leased lands would also allow the extraction of 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas, an increase of current production by 75%. But the oil companies aren’t drilling there. The reason behind this is as simple as it is obvious: because a restriction in the supply allows them to increase the cost of the commodity by whining about how difficult oil is to procure even before the speculators get their hands on it.

However, this leads us to another problem. Even if we were to convince the oil companies to drill on lands they already have access to, as previously noted, our refinery capacity is unable to process the additional oil.

Fifth Question: Why don’t we have enough refining capacity to meet our needs?
Answer: Refining Company Profit

As we can see by the graph, during the 70’s refiners were making profits of about 6%, which climbed to about 10% in 1979. However by 1985 refinery profit margins were down to almost nothing. In 1985 we were refining 15,659,000 barrels a day(XLS) but consuming 15,726,410 barrels (XLS), and our domestic production was 11,192,380 (XLS). Imported oil costs more because it is effected not only by the fact that it is a commodity but by shipping costs and disruptions in supply. As a direct result of this loss of profitability, the companies that refined oil shut down to restrict the supply of refined gasoline and thus increase their profits.

You can’t really blame a business for doing this, as the bottom line of a business is to make money. Basic economic strategy would seem to indicate that if you’re in a business that isn’t profitable you don’t stay in that business. However, our current crisis is directly related to these refinery shutdowns. Because we could not refine enough gasoline to meet our own consumption we were forced to outsource, which raises the cost.

Sixth Question: Why don’t we build more refineries?
Answer: Refinery and Oil Company Profit Margins

An article on State.com called ‘The Great Refinery Shortage’ says that according to the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association the last refinery built in America was the Garyville, Louisiana plant owned by Marathan Ashland in 1976. Since that time over a hundred and forty refineries have shut down. A new refinery costs about $1-3 billion to build. From ground breaking to the first drop of gasoline dispensed is roughly five to seven years. The cost to build these new refineries won’t be pulled from the profits of refinery or oil companies. They will be pulled either from government subsidies, or by adding additional costs to the already high cost of the products they produce.

Given that the average refinery can produce about 121,982 barrels of oil a day and the best refinery we have in the country (Exxommobile Refining & Supply Co in Baytown, Texas) can only do 562,500 barrels a day it would take about five Baytown Texas plants to even catch up the 3,104,453 shortfall in our refining capacity for our current demand. Yet by the time the plants go from ground breaking to the first drop of gasoline, our consumption will have grown to 21,800,000 barrels per day.

Seventh Question: What about Tar Sands?
Answer: No

Hyperion Project Data
Hyperion Project FAQ
Project Gorilla (Wikipedia) Aka Hyperion Project
Contact the Hyperion Project
Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada Tar Sands (Wikipedia)

In this article ‘New South Dakota Oil Refinery One Step Closer To Reality‘ on Gas2.org’s site, we see that Hyperion Energy has proposed to build the first new refinery in America since 1976. The new refinery is an oil sands refinery which will take Canadian tar sands, shipped to South Dakota, and create about 400,000 barrels a day of usable fuel of different types. The project will employ about 4500 construction workers and have jobs for 1800 full time employees at pay rates of $20-$30 an hour. It will cost over $10 billion dollars to build over the course of about six years to go online in 2015. It requires the rezoning of 3,293 acres of farmland and will use about 12 million gallons of water from the Missouri River each day. The project hopes to break ground in 2009 but is meeting opposition from local residents because of potential health risks and environmental concerns. The project’s rezoning application was approved in June of 2008.

The first new refinery in the United States, by the time it goes online in 2015, will process less than 1.8% of our country’s projected demand for oil. The tar sands plant here will not significantly reduce the price of any fuel oil in either the near or long term as it’s refinery capacity is too small and because it requires the shipment of tons of Canadian Tar sands from Fort McMurray in Alberta 1503 miles away. Even if you do not consider the environmental impact of the plant, the $10 billion dollar price tag to build it seems very steep for its minuscule processing ability even if you don’t consider the environmental impact of either the extraction of the tar sands or the refining process.

Eighth Question: What about peak oil, global warming and the environment?
Answer: Peak oil is very real so is global warming

Average Passenger Car Pollution Per Year:

Just looking at the average output by the average vehicle is staggering enough but one must realize that these are averages. This means that some vehicles will be lower and more efficient and some will be higher. But if you take those statistics and multiply them by the number of passenger vehicles currently operating in the US you get immense figures for the amount of pollution that our current fleet of passenger vehicles is pumping into the environment each year. Please note that these figures are for the average passenger car and this does not include the motorcycles, SUVs, vans, trucks, tankers, trailers and semis on the road every day.

Even the Bush administration and Republican Presidential candidate McCain have (finally) acknowledged that global warming is a very real threat not only to our way of life in general but to our national security even after all of Bush’s effort to quash any evidence of it’s existence and the attacks by the right wing agenda. We can see the effects around us everywhere we look increased wild fires, droughts, and floods and in the increased power of storms and hurricanes. We continue to ignore it though, because those in power feel that they can distract us with non-issues to protect the real culprits of global climate change who are padding their pockets and campaigns with money: the oil, automotive, and energy production industries. Make no mistake though - we as consumers bear a large share of the burden. These people would not continue to sell us dirty products if we refused to purchase them and instead opted for green power sources and conservation. However, that is the focus of another future article.

Peak Oil is also very real. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) gave a very good presentation on it recently in the House of Representatives that you can see on both CSPAN and YouTube (part 1, part 2 ). While I do not agree with Congressman Bartlett’s conclusion that we must drill in ANWR and the coastal areas of our nation, especially given the 68 million acres of land already leased to Big Oil that they’re not using, he does give a very informative presentation.

Peak Oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of oil production has been reached and all the easily available oil has been extracted from the earth. Oil companies would be the first to admit that the reason why they can charge so much for their products is because their product is something that is limited in supply. Oil, if you’ll excuse the old axiom, does not grow on trees. It is a horribly polluting, non-renewable resource that over time will only become harder and harder to get. Which logically means, that even if you remove speculation, price gouging, oil cartels and other forms of trickery - the price is just going to keep going up. More wars will be fought over this resource. More people will die. More pollution will be generated. Global warming will get worse. Unless, of course, we stop the course we are on and start forging a new way forward. The damage we have done to the environment will not be undone over night but it can be undone.

For anyone paying attention, the environment is an important issue. But we must recognize that there are Americans out there right now, who can’t afford to put fuel in their cars to get back and forth to work, do their jobs or even make doctor visits. People are genuinely suffering because of our current economic and energy issues. These are real people like you and like me. It’s part of the human condition that makes it hard to focus on something that is ‘down the road’ such as climate change when you’re starving right now. Whatever changes we make will have to take into account the impact on the wallets of our citizenry. If Joe the Farmer can’t till his fields and Susan the Truck Driver can’t fill up her rig, the rest of us aren’t going to get to eat. That’s an important consideration, but if none of us can breath the air or drink the water we’re all going to be dead a lot sooner.

Unfortunately there are are also a lot of people, specifically in the right wing, who either just don’t care about the environment or believe that any environmental action is the result of a bunch of unwashed liberal hippy moonbats. To be sure, there are some who take the ideas of conservation, recycling, and limiting pollution too far. But wanting to breathe clean air and drink water that isn’t full of toxins is not hippy claptrap especially if it is your child that ends up with respiratory problems, cancer, or other diseases as a result. Even to those people though, the result of increased health care costs for those having to live in polluted environments should be a consideration. Because the next global warming fueled environmental disaster could be in your backyard and not hundreds or thousands of miles away where you can ignore it.

Ninth Question: What about the gas tax moratorium?
Answer: One big red herring

First, to address the federal gas tax holiday that some on both sides of the aisle want to put forth. Currently, every gallon of gas sold in the US is subject to an 18.4 cent federal tax. Diesel is subject to a 24.4 cents. The average state tax on gasoline is 28.6 cents and 29.2 cents on diesel. Combined, these taxes represent the addition of 40 to 50 cents to the cost of each gallon of fuel sold in the country.

The reasons behind these taxes were simple. As of 2005, America contained over 4,011,628 miles of federal, state and local roadways all of which are vital to our economy and all of which need to be maintained in order for our economy to thrive. Federal and state gas taxes largely go to maintain those roadways to the tune of over $58 billion dollars in 2004 alone not just to patch potholes and perform maintenance but to rebuild roads after disasters and to plow roads during winter. These taxes are roughly double the taxes paid by the oil companies to the federal government and the states. Yes, an immediately moratorium on all gas taxes would drop the prices from $4.05 a gallon to around $3.50 a gallon immediately upon taking effect.

However, this will do absolutely nothing to either lower our consumption, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, increase our refinery capacity or reduce the amount of pollution we emit. In fact the most likely effect of this tax moratorium would be for oil companies and commodities speculators to seize this as an opportunity to raise the base prices of oil and gas to compensate so that then the tax holiday is over and the 50 or so cents returns we’ll actually end up paying $4.50 a gallon come winter. A gas tax holiday is in effect putting a small adhesive bandage on a swimmer who has been bitten in half by a shark.

Tenth Question: What about corporate greed, legislation and lobbyists?
Answer: Near term fixes

One of the greatest tragedies relating to this crisis that emerged from the Clinton years was the advent of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which became part of the US Code (Title 7, Chapter 1, Section 2h(3) and (g)) in the year 2000 after being signed by President Clinton. This bill, once signed into law, had the effect of exempting the entire energy commodity trading industry from both oversight and regulation.

Previously, if one wanted to purchase a unit of commodity futures, a buyer had to have on hand half the money he was going to risk to pay for the future price. So that if you wanted to have a futures contract for 25 barrels of oil at $40 each you would have to be able to put down at least $500 to cover the sale. With the deregulation of the industry, this cover dropped to 5% so that even were someone to investigate you that same trade would only require you to have $50 on hand. This also had the effect of locking in a price on other buyers in that, if six weeks from now 80% of the oil has been bought up at $40 a barrel, you must pay more than $40 a barrel in order to get at the remaining 20%. As such corporations built up paper empires without any real capital to back them up. Billions of imaginary dollars were used to purchase futures with no real money risked at all, driving up the price of energy in the process.

The above mentioned section was dubbed “The Enron Loophole” because the Enron corporation used it to bilk billions of dollars out of the state of California for electricity as a commodity. When the lack of real existing capital eventually caught up with Enron, the company collapsed like a house of cards and the US taxpayers got stuck with the results.

Unfortunately, this loophole was never closed and was closely guarded by many of our Congress members including John McCain through his association with Phil Graham, who has consistently voted against any bill with a provision to close it. It’s gotten so bad that even the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing on it and resolved that “[We] need to close the Enron loophole” in December of 2007. A more recent hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee concluded that no only did the Enron loophole apply to all energy commodities and that it accounted for at least 25% of the inflated value of our energy but that when new energy markets such as solar and wind energy started to take off that the bankers would then raid and plunder those markets as well for no other reason than they could. A recent article by Rupert Murdock’s Wall Street Journal even talks about how a gallon of Gas could fall to $2 within 30 days if Congress were to remove speculation from the equation.

This sort of legislative trap is not uncommon, as we can see by visiting internet sights such as OpenSecrets.Org, whose purpose is to track lobbyist contributions to politicians such as Senate Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to the tune of almost $75,000 from electrical utilities, over $30,000 from Oil and Gas and $83,000 from Commercial Banks. We can also see that the Oil & Gas industries have given $14,206,861 to politicians in 2008 alone for a grand total of over $216 million since 1990. Lest we think that only Republicans share the blame for this lobbyist plague we should also note that the Oil industry also donated almost $4 million dollars to Democratic party members thus far in 2008. So it’s no wonder that our Congress has been reluctant to do anything about this crisis. They are bought and paid for not by our tax dollars that pay for their salary, their lifestyles, their travel, and their free health care, but by the very monied corporate interests who are screwing us over.

If you really want to fix things, first support the following Bill: ‘Close the Enron Loophole Act’

Then, start digging up information on who has been donating to your Congressional and Senate representatives and grill them about it. Call them up. Don’t be shy. Their numbers are public domain information and readily available. Call your local newspapers and radio stations. Write editorials. Blog. Shed a little light on what is going on. As they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

United States House of Representatives
United States Senate

Conclusion: So, how do we fix this problem?

In the short term, we can’t. Our oil problems are a lot like obesity. A person does not become obese over night, nor can they become thin over night either. The public first became aware of the oil crisis in the 70’s, when OPEC decided to limit the supply of oil and caused massive shortages. It’s unfortunate for us that little was really done. The oil industry cannot be relied upon to fix our problem because their world record breaking profit margin over the last few years would be at stake. Without extreme levels of pressure from us, the citizens of America, we cannot rely on our politicians to solve our problem either - many of them have received vast sums of money from the oil companies.

The current administration has gone so far to raise the threshhold of toxins in the environment that would trigger a response so it is obvious that we cannot rely on them, either. The only people left to make positive change, preserve a habitable world for our children, and ensure that we have enough energy to meet our needs - is us.

The bottom line here is that our system is not sustainable at the level we currently ‘enjoy’. Any analyst who has looked at the issue with a critical eye will tell you this. Our economy cannot be saved by any one solution. Indeed our entire economy will need to be restructured in order to move us away from the use of fossil fuels entirely. But that will likely be the work of our grandchildren. There is no magic bullet and we certainly will not see substantial relief at any time in the near future. Not in drilling in ANWR or our coastal areas. Not in building new refineries. Not in relying on the good will of foreign powers or corporations. This is indeed a gloomy outlook, but I didn’t write this article to blow smoke up your backside. I wrote it to educate you on the nature of the threat we face.

In the short term, we can only see relief by making significant legislative changes, such as Closing the Enron Loophole, removing subsidies for oil companies and forcing oil companies to drill on the land they have already leased from the federal government and forcing them to sell the oil on the American market rather than internationally. It has been estimated by the Senate Commerce Committee that that speculation adds about $35 dollars to the cost of a barrel of gasoline. Eliminating the Enron loophole, which deregulated energy commodities trading, would drop about that much off of the price of a barrel of oil within a few weeks.

Drilling in coastal areas and in ANWR will do nothing in the short term to reduce our dependence on oil. We do not have the refinery capacity to refine the additional oil in any case and building additional drillships and refineries will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The cost of which will naturally be passed on to the consumer rather than being absorbed into oil company profit margins. The best additional drilling can do, aside from creating a potential ecological disaster, is kick the problem down the road a few years to let our grand kids and great grand kids figure out a way to shift our economy. This is not to say that we should not engage in additional drilling, but only that it will make little difference.

Building more refineries will help at least do a little to mitigate pricing, but not in the short term due to the cost and time expenditure it takes to build a refinery and we must also take into account such effects as air, water and soil quality, pollution emissions and property values when we decide to build them. Building more refineries will not reduce our dependence on foreign oil at all without more domestic oil production but it could potentially reduce or eliminate our need for foreign refineries.

The only real solution is to reduce our rate of consumption of fossil fuels. We can do this in many simple ways. By properly inflating our tires and tuning our engines. By changing our driving habits. By mandating better CAFE standards on passenger vehicles. By shifting to full electric plugin vehicles such as the Th!nk Global Ox. We can do this by shifting to more efficient hybrid vehicles. With $10 million in capital to build a single production facility, Th!nk Global believes that it can put out between 10,000 and 30,000 Ox’s a year with a price tag that would make them attractive to the average consumer. Just 30,000 internal combustion engines removed from the roads (if you refer to the statistics on passenger cars above) would save 17,430,000 gallons of gas a year. There are other such innovations as well, such as the compressed air car which uses no gasoline at all, emits nothing, recharges itself in a few hours and requires an lubrication change only every 30,000 miles.

Electric vehicles of course, will require electricity to power. But the fact is that solar and wind power have drastically reduced in cost over time and are expected to lower even more. Indeed many states (such as my home state of Maryland) are offering amazing subsidies and tax breaks to consumers who wish to install solar panels or wind generators on their houses and businesses. Even if you do not install enough to power your whole home (which, given the rising cost of electricity, is becoming a good idea) you can easily install a single panel to recharge your plugin electric vehicle. You’ll reduce emissions, reduce the cost of your travel expenses and reduce the demand for oil thus reducing the price at the same time.

Demand higher CAFE standards for all passenger vehicles, light and heavy trucks, which will drastically lower the amount of fuel consumed by the United States auto fleet. Detroit will whine about it, of course, but if Johnathan Goodwin, a ‘Do it Yourself’ car enthusiast can create a conversion for a 2005 Hummer to give it 60mpg and let it do 0-60 in 5 seconds for $5000, and 100 MPG out of a Lincoln Continental then Detroit with all its resources and equipment has absolutely no excuses that hold water.

Additionally, clean forms of power generation on large scales are also becoming cheaper and easier to obtain. The worlds largest solar power plant is currently being built in the town of Mouro in eastern Portugal. It will cost $500 million to build, emit nothing, and is expected to supply about 45 megawatts of power a year, enough to power 30,000 homes. You could built twenty of the Mouro plants for the cost of the Hyperion Plant in South Dakota. The company OptiSolar is planning to build the next largest solar farm in the world (PDF) in San Luis Obispo County, California, which at peak production would generate 500 megawatts of power, which is about the same as the average coal fired power plant and enough power for 190,000 homes. The San Luis Obispo facility should start construction in 2010 and is expected to be online before 2013.

There are also wind power generators, tidal power generators, hydro-electric power generators - all of which harness completely clean, non-polluting resources that do not deplete over time. As these technologies become more widespread, prices will fall even further than they have and the technologies will increase in efficiency over time. While these alternative energies may never completely replace our need for petroleum or other non-renewable sources they can and will mitigate the demand for oil. Adopting them can also reduce the effects of climate change and pollution as well.

Nuclear energy is another alternative, though nuclear power requires refined uranium which is not renewable, will eventually run out, and is environmentally harmful to mine. Modern nuclear power plants are significantly safer and more efficient than older model plants and what waste is produced can be sequestered with a reasonable degree of safety in facilities like Yucca Mountain. However, nuclear power plants themselves make attractive targets for terrorism, and the shipments of nuclear waste could become fuel for potential dirty bombs. Additionally, nuclear power plants take about $4.9 billion dollars and several years to build. The potential devastation of accidents such as Chernobyl and the near accident at Three Mile Island are still potential risks that tend to make nuclear power less attractive.

Make no mistake times ahead will be tough for us. But in the short term we can reduce the pressure on consumers if we take the correct legislative steps. That requires you to stand up, contact your House and Senate representative and tell them what you expect them to do. But it also requires you to inform your local leadership as well. It does you no good to try to foster change at the federal level if your neighbor’s oil refinery is leaking gasoline into your drinking water.

In the long term, innovation, use of renewable non-polluting energies, and conservation will reduce reliance on oil as a power source, which will reduce its over all cost and its effects on the environment and the economy. But we are the first and only (thus far) nation ever to put a human being on the surface of the moon. If we as a nation can handle a task as monumental as setting foot on another planetary body then we can solve our energy crisis. All we need to do is roll up our sleeves and get ourselves to work. Good luck to all of us.