Patriotism and Renewable Energy

Somehow terms such as being patriotic, pro-life, and liberal have been twisted to imply connotations that I do not support. This is my Holland Sentinel response to being patriotic:

In 1776, patriots fought for our nation to become independent.

Today we are anything but independent.

In the United States, 55-60% of all oil consumed is imported. As a nation, we use roughly 20.5 million barrels of oil a day. In other words, that is 861,000,000 gallons of oil coming from abroad EVERY single day.

In fact, our oil usage exceeds the total of the next 5 largest consumers – China, Japan, Russia, Germany and India COMBINED.

How did our country become so dependent on others for our main energy source? We forgot to be patriotic. After being hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the US should have responded in a sustained, systematic, and focused way to create an energy independent nation. Making people stupid by telling them that more off-shore drilling is the solution did not help, and will not help, the problem.

Being patriotic means doing what is best for your country, such as investing in new technologies for renewable energies, imposing gasoline taxes, and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that push us towards independence.

Reducing the price of oil, or off-shore drilling, is not the cure. Au contraire, prices need to be raised to break our oil addiction. We didn’t do what was best for our country in 1973 and it’s coming back to bite our pocketbooks now.

Get out your bicycle, turn off the lights, sell your gas guzzling V8, buy carbon credits to offset your carbon footprint, reduce, reuse and recycle. The fight is on, and the US is losing.

Be a patriot and help our nation become energy independent.