quote:Originally posted by Fighting Illini:quote:Originally posted by O No!:quote:Originally posted by 47.m450n.47:
I still think we should just drill in Alaska. Who cares if we kill some freaking caribou? OPEC is the cause of high gas prices. They limit supply to keep prices high. If they wanted to they could flood the market with oil and we could have plenty of cheap gas, but greedy people exist outside of the "the west" too.
It is estimated that there are between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels of oil in ANWR. The Department of Energy website states that the US uses about 6.9 billion barrels of oil per year. Therefore, all of the oil in ANWR would last us anywhere between a little less than one year, to a little more than two years.
The answer is to find an alternative energy source. (NOT ethanol!)
By your logic, if $100,000 was located beneath the ground in your back yard and you lost your job, you would pass on it because it would only replace your earnings for a year or two.
No, I would FIND ANOTHER JOB! Because if that $100,000 were like oil, if I dug it up I would have to give it to the "money companies" who would charge me just as much to use it as if I had never found it. Sure, it sounds simple enough, but really, oil companies are earning record profits. No matter how much oil we find and drill, do you think they are going to lower their profit margin?
If we drill in ANWR, a lot of that oil will go to China or India, just as the oil available today does. We can't strongarm the oil companies into letting only Americans have that oil, and at cheaper prices too.
All I am saying is that we need to find a alternative energy source. We have known for decades that someday we would run out of oil. If the Obama administration would challenge scientists to find a cheap, reliable source of energy before the decade is out, sort of in the same way Kennedy did with the moon landing, I would be willing to bet they could come up with something.