With so many people buying huge, wasteful SUVs, it’s a wonder that they have the nerve to complain about the cost of gas. Now if you drive one of the small, fuel-efficient cars or take public transit, know that I congratulate you. If, however, you are one of the people driving around in your huge truck all alone, your tales of woe at the gas pump fall on unsympathetic ears. True, your pocketbook suffers more than those of other people, but that was the sacrifice YOU made in order to gain a feeling of power over your fellow commuters.
The illusion of power:
If you’re thinking about getting a huge SUV, don’t. You’ve seen the commercials where the woman “suffers” from people cutting in line ahead of her, right? She goes out and buys an SUV to boost her ego. One of the things they conveniently forget to mention is that you only get the ILLUSION of power. Truly, even if we drive the most expensive cars on the road, we are no more important than anyone else out there just for owning such a car. The need to drive such an extravagantly large vehicle merely proves how insecure you are, how badly you desire to appear better than those around you. Yes, the SUV is a plea for attention. Those who need to drive SUVs as opposed to a smaller type of car are just like the schoolyard bully who needs to stress his superiority over other children because they feel inferior if they can’t put down the students around them. Really, no matter how many people you show off to, you are nothing special. We are all still just numbers in some database somewhere.
OPEC rules your wallet:
OPEC (the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries) and the oil companies have a tremendous amount of power over how much money leaves your wallet at present. Don’t believe me? That’s fine, just take anything you pay for, trace the path your money takes from there, and chances are you’ll find the oil companies and ultimately OPEC profiting every time you buy something. This all-pervasive web of OPEC influence takes a little from you for every gallon of gas, every new piece of plastic, every tank of jet fuel, every inch of tar on the road, every kilowatt produced in an oil power plant, every can of WD-40 you use, and much more.
Break the shackles, freedom awaits!
Although I don’t see the oil industry disappearing in the near future, I see the possibility of eliminating our need to import oil. If we use mass transit when we can, buy more fuel efficient cars, replace oil power plants with solar and wind power, recycle as much plastic as we can, support the development of alternative-fuel vehicles, and try to find alternative products for any petroleum-based products we can think of, we can break the bonds OPEC holds us in while they dig through our wallets. If America can gather enough support for such a cause, we may even be able to start exporting oil.
1 comment:
Good ideas, thanks for posting them.
Altogether, U.S. wind resources are enough to provide several times our current electricity use, although other sources (or storage) would still be needed because of the variability of the wind.
The key ingredient for wind's continued expansion? Continuing the federal wind energy production tax credit (PTC), which reduces a wind farm owner's tax payments by 1.9 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity the wind farm generates during the first 10 years of its operation. The PTC is currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2007. If the credit is extended for several years, we will see much greater use of this clean energy resource.
Regards,
Thomas O. Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.awea.org
www.ifnotwind.org
(P.S. I drive a Prius.)
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