Ever wonder how we as a nation have become so dependent on a single fuel source produced by smaller once underdeveloped nations? Is it true that most nations in the world believe we are greedy Americans, whose streets are lined with gold? What's most alarming is that we as a nation have allowed this to happen to us, without every even having a say in how and where our tax dollars were being spent. I suppose that when the large oil companies such as Standard Oil, and others began to explore for oil within the boundaries of the United States no one questioned the validity of such since it was financed mainly by private funds. It certainly seemed like a very worthwhile and profitable undertaking, and at the time, the nation was in the midsts of the industrial revolution, and mass production.
Hard to imagine what life was like before televisions, computers, and the like, but we were a hard working nation looking for new and better forms of supplying the goods most Americans needed and wanted at the time, and at a reasonable cost. The development of the steam engine certainly revolutionized the factory, and transportation, with coal and water being the fuel that provided the power needed to run that type of production machinery. Back then the biggest problem was getting enough water and coal to the location to provide the needed power. It meant that the factory had to be close to a water source, and enough coal produced and shipped to it, to allow for the rapid production of the products.
Over the past century, we have become almost totally dependent upon oil to provide the needed power to run almost everything in this country. Gas driven vehicles, such as automobiles, trucks and even trains has put us at the top of the list as a society run by the oil industry. Add to that the development of plastics, a petroleum based product, as well as others, and you have the makings of a disaster. Even the electric companies depend on oil to run their generators, as coal burning plants have been all but phased out. We either use electricity or oil primarily to heat our homes, and even with the development of solar power and use of gas to do the same thing, we are still the largest petroleum using country in the world. We have tried to develop nuclear power sources to replace the old coal or oil based electricity manufacturing facilities, only to be thwarted by the environmental and health risks allegedly posed by such facilities. Of course there are risks involved but do they outweigh our dependence on foreign oil.
In recent months oil prices controlled by OPEC have skyrocketed, and countries dependent upon them for their oil have been begging for them to up their production. However, countries like Venezuela who has an anti American leader in power has convinced the rest of the OPEC nations to continue to shorten the supply in an effort to continue to raise prices. What this wonderful idea the U.S. government and the oil companies had in years past has seemed to backfire. We were so busy fighting off the communist threat during the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, that we lost sight of what the fallout could be from putting all our eggs in one basket. We discovered a rich oil reserve in Alaska, but instead of building our own oil reserve and becoming less dependent on foreign oil, we tagged it for export to countries like China and Japan. The whole thing reads like a plot from a novel, where nations have conspired economically to break our economic back, and lose our place in the world as the most powerful and influential country.
I really don't give a damn about the rest of the world, I care about taking care and providing for myself and my family. We have an abudance of food in this country, yet we have people starving because the government controls how much of any food source we grow from year to year, and sell the abundant supply of others overseas, or donate to relief efforts overseas in underdeveloped nations. You rarely if ever see any of them coming to our aid in times of natural disasters, but we are always ready and willing to help them. The biggest mistake we have made is to allow special interest groups and lobbyists to control our political system of government. It is obvious that the government is powerless to stop all the corruption and unethical behavior of the oil companies or foreign nations. It's time we as a people took back control of our government and banded together for change.
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