Just Sick of It!

energy: Should we drill of shore or in Alaska and many other places in order to lower the price of oil? NO! Should we force middle eastern counties to produce more oil? NO!

Its time to think of different alternatives to gas and oil. We have been hearing the argument of energy independence for decades. Jimmy carter, a democrat, faced a similar issue and was saying everything we are saying today. I believe completely that we need to get away from oil but its up to the consumer to make the change happen. Everyone is complaining about high gas prices but more people are walking through their neighborhoods and bicycling because of it. Instead of being isolated in our cars, separated from the out side world, and passing the blame to the oil companies and the government we should get a fuel efficient car and a bike. Such a move will force the oil companies to try to get money somewhere els. Oil is bad for our health, bad for our environment, and a risk to our security. If Iran or any middle eastern country decided to stop selling us oil our whole country would be in chaos and we would be forced to invade. Take a walk out side and listen to the birds. When you run into a friend or have a short conversation with a stranger are you going to regret not being in a car. Tell me, how much road rage will you experience? I think we can force the government and the oil companies to realize the archaic days of oil are over!

abortion: When it comes to moral issues like abortion and gay marriage the government should not be able to support or ban anything. I believe it should be left up to individual communities, cities and or states in order to keep large groups of people from getting angry and creating civil unrest. In the process of determining what I think is right and wrong I tried first to find an accurate source of right and wrong. The government is not an accurate source because it can be wrong. The majority vote isn’t necessarily right either because it can be wrong. I decided to choose nature as my source to determine right from wrong, but it should be left up to individual communities, cities and or states to make sure the number of people insulted stays minimal.

social security: The fact that the government is trying to take care of my retirement is ridiculous! if they weren’t taking the eighty dollars out of my check every payday I would arrange to have one hundred dollars directly deposited into a retirement fund or put into a 401k.

education: We need more alternatives to public school. With less people in public schools there would be less issues with money and space and the class rooms would contain better face to face learning. Alternatives are of course private schools, both in class rooms and online, public schools that offer online opportunity’s where parents can help teach their kids instead of relying wholly on some teacher the parent doesn’t know, and home schooling. A combination of all these options would ease the stress on our school system as well as keeping us from relying wholly on the government to educate our children.

Updated 7/15/2008 [ED: Fixed YouTube embed's]
Updated 7/25/2008 [ED: Fixed YouTube embed's]

There has been a quite, may semi-quite, storm brewing on the Internet as of late about a tiny, no nothing island out in Alaska, called Gull Island. Gull Island, and by extension the under it and Alaska, could be the solution to lowing the price of Oil within the next few year. This has spread so much as of late that on today’s Sean Hannity show a caller mentioned it to the guest host.

So in case you are having trouble finding out about this little island that could let me give you a little history and information that I have collected. Gull Island is located about five miles off shore from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska’s northern slope.

Gull Island, although close, is not in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or ANWR which you can see the border of it does not cover the Prudhoe Bay area and is a few miles north east of the ANWR area boundary, which is also clearly visible on the official ANWR site.

In the 1970’s Lindsay Williams a Chaplain for the Alyeska Pipeline Company witnessed ARCO drill, test, analyze and then cap a huge oil find on Gull Island. It’s been said that Gull Island has enough oil to pump 2 million barrels of oil a day for 200 years. We import about 10 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2007, so using 1970 era figures and technology we have solved 1/5th of our foreign oil dependence on an already drilled and currently capped well.

But that was 1970 and technology has gotten at least a little bit better since then. Keeping that in mind I believe that 2 million is a entry level figure and should at least double with current technology and methods. If we start drilling now we will see our prices start dropping soon, but it won’t be by a lot. By freeing our oil companies to build new we will be sending a message to the futures markets and futures prices will drop.

If we leave our local oil and Gull Island to just sit there we could end up paying a lot more and oil will reach $170 a barrel easy. If you don’t believe me King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia today mentioned in a speech that we should all get used to current prices and prepare for even higher rates.

But there is no problem right? We could all be switching to other cars, and all those people that can’t afford an electric car or a hybrid should just walk or take the bus, because that’s how you move a family with kids around, the bus. But let is not live off of our land here in America who is without a doubt the most resource rich country in the world from oil to natural gas.

So let the debate rage on. Let’s keep pushing our country toward a depression by raising the cost of transportation and goods to a level where the low-middle and lower class of our society cannot eat or get around. Somehow I should be more worried about a few anamials and micro-organisms in Alaska then my next door neighbor, yea that makes sense.

In case you’ve been living under a rock the hippie green guys have been touting the amazing advancement of Ethanol for use in motor vehicles as a replacement for gasoline. Ethanol can be produced by the fermentation of sugars or the the hydration of ethylene from petroleum, or as we like to call it oil. The mainstay of this movement is the finger pointing to Brazil and this success with Ethanol based fuel. If you just listened to the talking heads, and green hippie’s you would be under the assumption that Brazil is 100% gas free, but you would be wrong.

Brazil uses, for that vast majority of their vehicles, a blend of about 24% ethanol and 76% petroleum gasoline. This blend roughly accounts for about 30% of the countries automotive fuel. Remember these are FlexFuel vehicles do not run on 100% ethanol. In 2005 73% of all vehicles sold in Brazil were FlexFuel. The meat of the issue is that Brazil uses pure sugar cane, and cane-waste, to produce ethanol via fermentation. Sugar cane has a long growing season and because of it’s high sucrose content it easily can be fermented into ethanol. All I have to say is good for Brazil, they took the oil crisis of the 1970’s and did something productive, more then I can say the United States did.

In the US the common Ethanol fuel is E85, which is is 85% ethanol and 15% petroleum gasoline. So were better off then Brazil already, they only use E76 and we use E85. Well there is a hidden problem Brazil uses sugar cane and in the US we are using corn. Brazil can produce ethanol for about 22 cents per liter, which in the US we can produce ethanol for about 30 cents per liter, a cost difference of about 30%. The reason, corn needs to be converted into sugar before it can be fermented. Additionally Corn is the least efficient crop to produce ethanol from.

Now we run into a hot topic, the net energy effect of ethanol production. There are a lot of very bias postings on the Internet about this topic, but from my research on the subject and reading of the papers it does look like ethanol has a positive net-energy effect. This greatly depended on the equipment used, the milling process and the method of fermentation. But in the end it’s far you can go in car on the fuel and, well every seems to agree that you don’t get the same MPG on a E85 then you do plain old gas.

Shifting to a comply different front, ethanol use as a motor fuel is driving up food prices. Because of the increased demand for corn the price has risen sharply as of late and is driving not only US food prices up but prices for any product that uses corn. Grain prices were driven by population growth and human consumption, now that we are trying to use it to fuel vehicles we could be causing the poor in this country and across the globe to do we less food. Corn is a food, not a fuel!

I’m all for eliminating our dependence on oil, foreign or domestic. But we have to go about it the right way, no more of this half assed FlexFuel or Hybrid crap that the eco-friendly hippie tree hugging tards keep trying to cram down our collective throats without thinking of the ramifications of their actions. We need to research better energy storage technology to make longer lasting and higher capacity batteries that can be reused for 100% electric cars, nothing less should do.

No go and eat some corn on the cob and try and avoid the urge to stick it in your gas tank.