green | rising

Building Offshore Platforms, But Not For Drilling

August 19th, 2008 by Vihar Sheth
Posted in Energy, Government, Responsibility

I have a dream that one day a politician will get on TV and tell people gas prices are supposed to be high, and that there’s a cost to living 50 miles from an urban center. She’ll say that cost is $4 a gallon, and it should be higher. Suck it up she’ll demand.

But, in my dream she also includes an equally sized reduction in health care costs, saying Americans should be able to get preventive care on the cheap so that future health care expenditures are greatly reduced. The dream includes other points as well, but I’d like to focus on the above: $2 antibiotics, $20 gas.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in another flash of brilliantly bright  (I’m blind!) idiocy, said she is open to offshore drilling. The NY Times piece to which I linked includes includes classic posturing from both sides of the aisle, and demonstrates again that Republicans plain just don’t care about other people, and that Democrats plain just can’t help but bend over in times of conflict.

Perhaps my frustration is born from the fact that the answer to our energy problems is so simple in design that it’s hard to see. I’ve written beforethat the America needs not more locally sourced oil, but less oil in general. This isn’t a new concept, but one that’s not easily grasped by people, especially that smart-decision-challenged group of individuals we call our elected officials. I feel a terribly tangential rant coming on about term limits so I must take a deep breath and focus.

Announcements like this one, for the construction of the nation’s largest solar plant, keep me from stroking out, but they are few and far between. Conservation, and the development of new renewable energy technologies (that don’t use food as fuel), are the only right strategies to a better tomorrow. Plain and simple. What happened to the days of reaching for the stars and actually touching them?

That being said, I have mixed feelings about what the next decade will bring. If we put our minds to it, we could develop good enough solar, wind, biomass and efficiency technologies to replace fossil fuels entirely. If we roll over, new platforms will be built because that’s what government of late does - suck pipeline. Most likely both will happen, but if we’re lucky, the last boat of supplies to the shiny, new platforms won’t be carrying drills. It’ll be filled with some rope, our worthless leaders, and a nice, sturdy plank.

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