Home › News ›

Technology Won't Cure U.S. Oil Addiction

Posted by: Abhijeet Chavan

3 February 2006 - 2:00pm

President Bush said that new technology will cure the nation's oil addiction. Technology is already here; the will to use it is missing.

"Engineers have produced a basket of new technologies for making cars burn less gasoline, yet fuel standards for passenger cars in this country haven't changed in more than two decades, and fuel economy has barely budged...Technologies that could make the U.S. more energy independent sit on the shelf while the automotive industry dithers about raising the price of a car by a couple of thousand dollars..."

Full Story: Many ways, no will
Source: The Los Angeles Times, February 2, 2006
»

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

An interim source

Submitted by JimG on Mon, 02/06/2006 - 13:04.

The whole deal with the oil mystifies me. I saw a special on TV about a week ago on oil in Canada. In Alberta, Ft. McHenry, the is more oil, in the sand above ground than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. It is scooped up with front-end loaders, put into the world's ;argest dump trucks (each load contains $10,000 of refined oil), processed and produces the highest quality oil. Canada is a friendly country; you know what oil is there (it's not hidden under ground...maybe there, maybe not). The problem is workers. They need 100,000 workers to produce the maximum amount of oil. Pay is in the range of $100k-200k for a low level unskilled worker. The location is in the middle of nowhere, but they built an airstrip to give the employees a break every month in civilization. Here is a link to an article released today: http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=4e35cd3a-78b7-49e0...
Check it out and tell me why we need "alternative energy sources". The problem with Bush's recent statements about developing from wood chips and grass is that there is no infrastructure to deliver it. See any pure ethanol "gas" stations lately; hydrogen fueling stations. Hell, finding diesel except at a truck stop is almost impossible.
The answer lies in Canada in the immediate future, It won't wean the US from oil. Until some major energy producer commits to a mass infrastructure development to distribute alternative energy; or technology advances in electric power (which also consumes oil and coal in it's production), we will continue our dependency.

Oil Addiction

Submitted by Ken Firestone on Sat, 02/04/2006 - 12:25.

It isn't oil addiction that is the problem, it's automobile addiction. We have to get over the idea that we cannot move more than 100 feet without a couple of tons of SUV under our supersized behinds.

Ken

Bookmark and Share
“
In recent years, some public officials and civic leaders have begun to question the existing models for dealing with homelessness, arguing that the persistence of the problem shows that what has been done up until now isn't working.
”