More bad news for the environment, via Reuters:
The Bush administration on Thursday said it formed a committee to find faster ways for oil and natural gas companies to obtain drilling permits on federal lands in the Rocky Mountains.Environmental groups have criticized the White House for being too eager to help the energy industry win access to federal lands that are now off-limits to drilling.
President George W. Bush, a former Texas oilman, made energy exploration in the western U.S. a focal-point of his plan to help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and to meet future demand for natural gas.
When will the Bush administration - or any administration - get the fact that dependence on foreign oil is not the problem? Dependence on OIL is the problem, yet very little money goes to finding an alternative.
If the world's fuel reserves were due to run out in only a decade or two, we would be hard at work on a renewable source of energy. It would be difficult, but we would heavily fund the effort and we would find a solution.
But hey, since we have all that oil just sitting around in useless places like the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and rural states like Wyoming and Montana, why bother?
Well, the Middle East without oil would be just another Africa - a place of illness and warfare and bone-crushing poverty - and you'd have to look pretty damn hard in such a place to find traces of the American government. So yes, dependence on foreign oil does matter. Hundreds of American lives have been lost because of it. But the answer does not lie in turning inward and tearing up the wildlands of Alaska or the Rocky Mountains.
A real solution is much more difficult. It will take vision, brilliance, great effort and the backbone to stand up to the energy companies. If we can build a bomb that obliterates all organic life, surely we can do this. The result would be the kind of once-in-a-century discovery that changes the world as we know it - more lasting, more ecologically sane, something for which human beings wouldn't have to die.
