RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!

LindsayRichards wrote:
We are sitting on huge supplies of oil, natural gas, and coal. Enough for decades ...

Oh, really? Can you back this claim with figures and citations? My understanding is that all the oil under the US would just get us through a few months.

Natural gas demand has escalated tremendously as electric companies bring more natural gas turbines online. Every homeowner has watched the price of natural gas climb to where it's as expensive as electricity for heating and cooking.

Coal is a loser: it's dirty to mine, dirty to burn, and you end up with a horrid mess from end to end of the process. And there is NO such thing as "Clean Coal".

...and the politicians keep us from using them. If we were selfsufficient in energy, America would be a very different place today.

We are signatories to international business treaties that we would have to violate (at risk of war) to extract ourselves from those. As it is, oil is fungible and liquid, so 75-89% of all oil pumped anywhere goes to foreigners. That includes any oil from the USA. So we would only get about 20-25% of the oil drawn from US wells. We would have to seize the wells and oil companies (the US owns NO oil pumping companies) to keep all the oil, which would violate international private property laws. That's what socialist countries do when they nationalize oil companies.

We created the international oil pool 60 years ago so as to use foreign oil instead of burning up our own.

The only way to get energy independence is to RADICALLY reduce consumption, and to develop new energy sources.