Reclaiming America’s Liberty.
Oil closed today at $73.73. The first Arab Oil Embargo took place in 1973. Coincidence?
America faces a challenge - how to muster the political will to develop alternative energy sources on the scale needed to maintain our quality of life. Providing our military youth to Iraq to build Middle Eastern stability will buy our society time to reinvest out of oil but will we? Our President tells us we are ‘addicted to oil’ and then does little about it. In my public service role, I watched a natural gas distribution company tell me last night that converting vehicles to natural gas was a gas conservation program. Substituting one middle eastern derived fuel for another is not conservation.
Both oil and natural gas are insecurity fuels.
Does anyone in the energy business pursue America’s interests?
Does anyone in Congress pursue America’s interests?
What are America’s interests, anyway?
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?
Do we have Life when we lose a whole city to a hurricane?
Do we have Liberty when we are shackled by petroleum handcuffs to pre-modern societies that mean us ill?
Can we pursue happiness in the face of terrorism? Energy shortages? Population growth?
Any solution to these problems takes time.
For example, my wife and I have totally re-engineered our home for maximal energy efficiency. We replaced a mid-1950s home with a newly designed passive solar home. It has the long eaves, the low energy emissivity windows, the solar water heat and, recently, the solar photo-voltaic array. We purchase the energy that we don’t create from West Texas wind farms.
This process took us more than six years of planning, building and installing. We have sacrificed significant sums of money to be prepared for the energy crisis we are entering. Many more people are going to have to start making these kinds of investments for America to reclaim her Liberty.
Alternative Energy: Reclaiming America’s Liberty.