Letter to the editor February 26, 2006
Coming in second.
We didn’t lose, we weren’t beaten we just came in second. This seems to be the rallying cry of the Bush administration. It seems everything they touch comes in second, Iraq, Katrina, corruption, and now our dependence on Saudi oil.
Saudi oil is very venerable to disruption or destruction. We have seen the first attack and it failed. Next time the attackers will use a different strategy, maybe long range rockets that can’t be protected by wire fences, or maybe incendiary balloons like those the Japanese used in WW2. The point is that our supply is extremely vulnerable. We should be creating a Manhattan type project to make us independent of foreign oil. The government should be pulling out all the stops including better mileage on transportation, nuclear energy for stationary power plants, converting waste biomass to liquid fuel, massive wind farms in the plains states to provide electric power, drilling for oil along the continental shelf, building power plants using coal gasification at the mine head instead of transporting coal to distant power plants, better electrical infrastructure to allow more efficient power distribution from the generator to users. This is but a short list and if it sounds familiar, it is many of the same ideas created during the last oil crisis.
Unless we do something soon, the United States may have won the race, but it will come in second.
President Bush, get rid of your advisers and get some people on your staff that are interested in the welfare of the United States and not on how much power they can control for themselves.
