Yes, indeed yesterday was earth day, what did you do to celebrate? Did you go out and buy the new LED light bulb from Phillips the light bulb that won the US Dept. of Energy’s “Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize.”; A contest held to award a prize to the creator of an affordable LED light. Did I mention that Phillips was the only entrant and the light bulb costs $60. Affordable for whom? But the light bulb will last for twenty years…if you only use it for four hours or less a day. Right, so what did you do with your earth day?
Perhaps like some, you did nothing, okay make that most did nothing, some did something, and others did something to impact those people attempting to save mother earth here. I am one of the latter, the person who leaves the light on and runs the car on Earth day, just to increase my carbon footprint. In fact, I would someday like to expand my carbon footprint to the size of Al Gore’s, but really that is wishful thinking. Not everyone of us can have a carbon footprint so large as to wipe out entire species when it hits the ground. But, again I digress.
What this is really all about is conservation. The government wants us to conserve energy. But like from the author below points out, energy is what drives this economy. We have moved from a goods based economy to a service based economy over the last seventy years and the main service that everyone needs is energy. It doesn’t matter if the energy powers your home, car, lawn mower, etc. When we use energy it stimulates the service economy of the United States. The more you use, the more needs to be produced, the more drilling is done the more oil and gas come out of the earth, the more we use, the cheaper it gets and so on and so forth. Conservation of energy in the US is just a quick way to go broke in the long run. “This is probably the biggest stimulus we have going,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research told the WSJ.
According to the Journal “$145 billion will be spent drilling and completing wells this year, up from $13 billion in 2000.” And it’s not costing taxpayers anything.
Five years ago, many labored under the false assumption that the world was quickly running out of carbon-based fuels. But today we know that that’s not true.
While it’s estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in reserves, “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the [US] has 4.3 trillion barrels of in-place oil shale resources centered in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming,” said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management” according to the Associated Press.
4.3 trillion barrels is 16 times the reserves of Saudi Arabia, or enough oil to supply the US for 600 years.
Building out the infrastructure to drill and transport that oil just from the Rocky Mountains in the US could supply literally ten million jobs for American workers, while supplying literally millions of barrels of oil per day, repairing our energy security for the next century. The end result would be the creation of about $15 trillion in wealth over the next ten years, with almost $4 trillion in revenues net to the federal government all without raising taxes.
So use all the energy you can, it is the American way.
Source here.