I’m sitting here watching the nightly news and my stream-of-consciousness is more active than usual, so I’m going to blog some of this stuff. I can’t guarantee that this will make a lot of sense, so consider yourself warned…

1. I think President Bush was absolutely correct to refuse to use the nation’s strategic petroleum reserves in order to lower gasoline prices. As odd as it sounds coming from me, I agree with him when he says we need to save those reserves for a rainy day. I’m a big believer in savings accounts and the way things are going in the Middle East, a major disruption of our supply is not only possible, but downright likely.

   That said, however, his refusal smacks as much of politics as practicality to me. This may be the right decision, justified by the correct reasoning, but I suspect that he actually refused because it was Democrats who asked for it, and because he’s piqued about his energy bill being stalled in Congress. If you haven’t been following this one (and I suspect that few people have, because it’s really kind of a boring subject), the hang-up is that his energy bill revolves around drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last stretches of pristine wilderness anywhere in the world. Personally, I think drilling in the ANWR is wrong-headed on any number of levels. Without getting too far afield (these are supposed to be brief posts, after all…), I accept the logic of those who say that there isn’t enough there to justify wrecking the unspoiled landscape in order to get at it.

   Look, people, oil is a finite resource. We are running out of it. We are likely going to run out of it in my lifetime. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. As we get closer to that zero point, you can expect the prices to keep rising. And you can expect nations to go to war in order to get what’s left. There are those who say that we’re already fighting for oil — not me, I think that’s too simplistic — but if we are, then we’re not being honest about it. I think a day will come when we become very honest and open about it. (By “we,” I don’t necessarily mean the United States, although we’re the biggest consumer of the Black Gold; I mean the human race.) Just like the punk-rock nomads in The Road Warrior, we’re going to keep fighting for every last drop of “the juice,” picking the bones of a dead world, until there isn’t any left. And once that happens, unless we get real smart and real proactive and real forward-looking (and really soon), everything that we call “normal” will grind to a halt and everyone will be back on horses and subsistence-farming for a living.

   Despoiling a wilderness won’t change that ultimate outcome… so instead of doing that, why aren’t we seriously, earnestly, courageously looking for an alternative? Hydrogen fuel cells look like the most feasible replacement to me, and somebody (like, say, the President) needs to make a John F. Kennedy-style challenge to have that technology working and easily available within the decade. Granted, Bush did mention this tech in a speech a while back, but has any funding been granted to pursue the research? Not to my knowledge, and this is an issue I’ve been following.

   Fuel cells, if we could get the damn things small enough, safe enough, and efficient enough, could change everything. We could disassemble the electrical grid that leaves us in the dark every few months and supply every home and every office building from individual power plants set up alongside our central air-conditioning units. We wouldn’t have to worry about finding alternatives to gasoline-powered cars for several more decades if we could replace all the fossil-fuel powerplants that make electricity for us and suck up the lion’s share of crude oil imports (that’s a stat most people don’t know). You see, cars are a relatively small part of the problem. And best of all, if we could eliminate or drastically reduce our need for oil, we could get the hell out of the Middle East.

2. On the subject of replacing powerplants, why aren’t we setting up windmills everywhere the wind blows? I can think of a number of places around the Salt Lake Valley that would probably be suitable. Everyone screams because they don’t want them in their backyards, but I think that’s just because they haven’t really seen them. I saw a lot of windmills on my trip to Germany last fall, and they are very inoffensive-looking structures. Personally, I think they’re neat…
3. Getting back to gasoline, did you participate in the “gas out” today? An email chain-letter circulated a week back, urging people to refuse to buy gas today in order to cut into profits of the evil oil companies and send a message. I don’t think it worked — I saw plenty of people at the gas stations today — but even if you could get a significant level of compliance, this scheme wouldn’t work. One day without sales wouldn’t harm the oil companies in the least (it might harm all those convenience stores, but only because people who aren’t buying gas also aren’t buying fountain drinks and overpriced snack foods, which is where these stores make their profits). These attempts at boycotts are well-intentioned and I agree with them in spirit — I don’t like the high prices either — but the people who cook them up don’t understand supply-and-demand. The prices are high, and will remain high, because there’s a high demand for the product. Not buying the product on a particular day won’t affect that demand in the long-term, just as not buying a DVD today won’t result in DVD prices changing. What will affect prices is if demand decreases for a long period of time, and the only way that will happen is if people stop driving for a while. That means that in order to make a difference, we need to car pool or take public transportation or build cars that only need to be fueled up once a month, and I don’t see any of those things happening anytime soon.

   And on the subject of gas prices, I’m probably going to earn some enemies by saying this, but I think we Americans are being incredibly whiny about this. Two bucks a gallon only seems high because we’re not used to it. We’re spoiled. The truth is that we have the lowest gas prices of any industrialized nation on earth. We’re just now getting a taste of what the Europeans and Japanese have dealt with for decades. Again, I’m not saying that I like paying this much for gas, but I understand that we live in priveleged circumstances and really have little right to complain when we’re forced to grow up a little.

   The really frustrating thing is that this has happened before and we haven’t learned a damn thing. After the gas crisis of the ’70s, we made smaller, more efficient cars for a while, but gradually, little by little, they crept upward in size until we’re right back into our bad old habits, only instead of massive, supertanker-sized family cars, we’re all driving, massive, military-styled SUVs. We’ve done this to ourselves by making poor decisions…

4. And then there’s the story about an American helicopter shooting up an Iraqi wedding party. To be fair, the story hasn’t been confirmed yet; no one knows for sure what or even if this attack actually occured. Maybe someone took a pot shot at our chopper; maybe an overzealous chopper pilot mistook celebratory gunfire for hostile activity. But the rumor is that we wasted 45 wedding guests for no good reason. This would be very bad PR at any time, but coming right on the heels of the Abu Ghraib mess, it looks especially bad. Even if this story is total bullshit, the fact that it’s circulating at all indicates to me that we have a serious problem in Iraq…

Well, I just flipped channels and found A Few Good Men on Channel 14. Nicholson’s big tirade is coming up, and I figure I’ve probably scared everyone off with my ranting anyhow, so I’m going to call it a night…