(Long Island, NY) Now here’s a funny thing. Hillary Clinton is quoted at Politico.com as saying she wants to take on OPEC. According to Ben Smith’s Blog, Clinton said OPEC is a monopoly and a complaint should be filed with the World Trade Organization.
It sounds great–the lone campaigner for oil-related sanity in a world facing $200 a barrel oil prices in the not-too-distant future. But the reality of this situation will probably be much different. The President–whoever she or he might be after this mad election year is finished–is free to file as many complaints as possible. But it won’t change a thing. It will be the official equivalent of what Hillary Clinton is doing right now; blowing a lot of hot air.
I am not what that tolerant and oh-so-levelheaded Rush Limbaugh would call an “environmentalist whacko”. I do think we have a growing crisis worldwide because of our out-of-control consumerist mindset. I also believe we are jeopardizing the planet because serious attempts to curb our environmental problems are not being made. The number of computer monitors and old television sets alone would stagger the imagination if we had an actual figure of how many are being thrown away. How many cell phones will be thrown out this year? Next year? You get where I’m going here…
Hillary Clinton Versus OPEC
So it is with great reluctance that I must advocate the notion that Americans have two basic choices. We either start drilling for oil ourselves in places like Alaska and elsewhere, OR we ditch fossil fuels completely, give a big rude middle finger to OPEC and begin anew with electrically powered vehicles and other sustainable, renewable fuel sources.
By sustainable, I do NOT mean “harvestable at the expense of starving people who would otherwise get these crops.” Yes, I am talking about ethanol.
Clinton is not addressing the REAL PROBLEM and that is why she is full of cow manure right up to her mascara. The real problem is that until gasoline reaches ten dollars a gallon, we’re not going to think we have an energy crisis. What we believe have right now is a very expensive PROBLEM. But this problem threatens to become a major crisis. It won’t be until we get rationing and starving poor people who literally cannot afford to buy ANY food that it’s declared an emergency.
We’ve made our beds in this country, and now we have to lie in them. Some of us are fortunate enough to live near train stations, subways, mass transit of all kinds. But the rest are going to learn quickly why European communities are centralized, smaller and less dependent on cars. In the UK, where petrol is four dollars or more per LITER, centralized communities make a great deal of sense. America’s sprawling, decentralized cities and rural areas are now feeling a major crunch that won’t go away because Hillary Clinton complains to the WTO.
The sad part is that neither solution–the Alaska drilling or the electric cars–are going to happen anytime soon. Instead, for reasons which are infuriatingly unknown, we will be forced to sit around and watch gas creep to five, six, ten dollars per gallon. All the George W. Bush economic incentive tax bribes in the world won’t make ME fill up my tank anytime soon. I walk and use public transit 90% of the time now. Actually more like 95%, I refuse to throw any more money down the toilet DRIVING.
If more of us could be vocal about that, I think maybe we could affect some change, but I am not holding my breath. I would like to know what Clinton, Obama and McCain have spent on gas over the course of this campaign. It seems almost as wasteful as NASCAR putting fuel in the tanks of all those race cars so they can drive around in circles for hours.
One of these days, gas might get so expensive that watching NASCAR is as close as any of us common people get to driving. I wonder what Hillary would say about THAT.
