Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Other Side Of Going Green

This post isn't about being against or for anything. It's just a side of the debate that I haven't seen discussed.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. With this massive global movement about going Green, which is good because a clean planet is a good planet, there's been an aspect that's been mostly ignored. At least I've never heard it discussed. When we get off polluting fossil fuels such as oil and coal, what happens to the people working in those industries? I don't mean the corporate fat cats sitting in their ivory towers lighting their cigars with $100 bills[/sarcasm]. I mean the average man and woman working their asses off in a coal mine or on an oil derrick to support their families. There are some people out there who can't do anything else. Believe me, I know. This is all they know how to do for varying reasons. What happens to them? Do we tell them to get a less skilled job that pays half of what they were making before? That their families may have to do without some things because it's better in the long run? I ask because I don't know.

And then there's this. Many, if not most, gas stations now use blended mixtures of gas and ethanol and are driver are getting lower gas mileage. A local station did a story where they talked to a guy who was getting 16mpg before they switched and is now getting 14mpg. 9% less. And what with gas now at least $3.19/gallon, $3.29 in other areas of Oklahoma, people are having to fill up more often costing them even more in the long run. Why is hardly anyone talking about this? Could it maybe, possibly be that most in the media have an agenda and don't see fit to give face time to the other side of a debate that's closed?

And I love in that Tulsa World piece how some actually think President Bush and VP Cheney are somehow behind this. How he'll be sipping martini's in Cancun with his profits when he leaves office. These are probably the same people who think he masterminded the attacks on September 11, 2001.

1 comments:

Bad Bob said...

Even though we are trying to go green, I don't think we'll ever get completely weaned from fossil fuels. There are many other things they are used for other than gasoline.
I get over 80mpg in my Honda Insight if I drive 55mph on the highway, so thankfully I have been able to deal with that part of the cost of gas. It's just that everything will go up significantly because of it. Ethanol is only cleaner in exhaust emissions. When you consider how much it takes for growing it, processing it and getting it somewhere. It's not as clean as everyone would have us believe. Besides everything at the grocery store has corn oil in it, but most of the farmers are growing corn for ethanol now so that'll increase the cost of food too.

The thing that pisses me off more than anything is that we only get a percentage of our oil from the middle east, but that becomes the price base for all of it. It doesn't matter if we pump it from Alaska or the gulf or get it from Canada, they say the cost is $112 a barrel? And then they say other countries pay a lot more than we do. So what? That is not our problem.