Yonit Shames
Published: September 14, 2005
Consider the following scenario: you’re standing at the gas station, waiting on an hour-long line, and your neighbor, driving a nine mile-per-gallon Dodge Ram, loads 20 extra gallons of fuel into his or her truck. You try to stifle your irritation by reminding yourself that capitalism is what led America to become as great is it is, but as the gas station attendant comes out and raises the price on the sign to $3 a gallon, you feel your patience waning.
Sound familiar?
It’s already well-established and overly-rehashed fact that the United States, home to roughly 290 million people, is the world’s largest oil consumer at 20 million barrels of oil a day. US oil consumption grossly exceeds both far larger and more populated countries such as China (1.3 billion people and 5.6 million barrels a day) and countries that have far larger oil reserves, such as Saudi Arabia.
Also becoming shrilly well-established is the fragility of our energy supply, as proven by Hurricane Katrina’s impact on our day-to-day life here in the Panhandle. Pensacola residents, already jaded by a costly and exhausting year, have simply ceased to be surprised by skyrocketing oil prices. Severe shortages are the words of the day. In fact, last week, local news media reported that Escambia County school buses only had enough diesel fuel to get them through one more week.
Katrina’s enormous and tragic human effects aside, the storm was only a small hiccup in the world of oil production. If our energy supply system is so fragile that one hurricane can disrupt oil supplies to the entire country and boost prices so greatly, we are walking a very fine line indeed between supply and demand. America’s oil refineries and pumps are already running at nearly 100% capacity. What happens when those oil reserves begin to run out?
No one’s here to argue the validity or invalidity of the American Dream. But the fact is, every luxury that depends on a limited resource comes with a far heftier price tag than the consumer pays.
Oil shortages unfortunately do not only affect motor vehicles. Almost every type of industry, including power companies and other utilities, is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel. Future shortages could radically reshape American life- in ways that could range from widespread electrical outages to severe impairment of our industry-dependent economy.
And the shortages are coming. In the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, “By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves.”
Cheney was talking about 2010, a mere five years from now.
Americans should take the current inconvenience they are suffering from a mere glitch in oil production as a lesson for a fast-approaching future. We must do our utmost to conserve oil, and our resources should be immediately rerouted to focus on alternative energy sources. Our future as an industrialized, free and democratic nation depends on it.