No More Incumbents Blog

The Senate voted 97 to 1 today to stopping saving 70,000 barrels of oil per day in the ‘Strategic’ Oil Reserve.  The Oil Reserve is kind of like a Santa Saver Account for Oil, but like many Santa Saver accounts it is massively under funded.

Surprise, Surprise, the US Government under funded something.

The US consumes about 21,000,000 barrels of oil per day.  Saving 70,000 barrels per day, is kind of like a keep the change program on your credit card, where your purchases are rounded up to the nearest dollar and the change goes into a savings account.  You are never going to get rich from this and you are never going to have much of a safety net.

That’s pretty much how it is with the Oil Reserve.  We have managed to save up 702,000,000 barrels of oil over more than 10,000 days.  702 million may sound like an impressive number.

Its only about 35 days worth of oil consumption for the US.

That means that if a hurricane hit the gulf, our pipeline in Alaska stopped pumping oil, and we lost all other sources of oil (say in a war or something), the US would only have 35 days worth of oil to keep things like cars, freight, trains, planes, the military and some power plants running.

That’s not strategic, that’s tactical.  Strategic would include obtaining new sources of power.  This is barely as good as a 30 minute backup generator when your lights go out for 2 weeks during a winter ice storm.  Regardless, it would appear that it could be curtains for the US Strategic Oil Reserve.

In North Carolina, Our water supply in the SouthEast is running dry. The obvious concern is drinking water or water for crops.

But the bigger and more immediate concern is for the electric grid on the East Coast. Projections currently indicate that many if not all of our dozen power plants near Charlotte may have to come offline when their water intakes for cooling the nuclear and coal power plants will be dry in an empty lake or river.

This is expected to happen as early as May or June of 2008.

Not so long ago, much of the Northeast was wiped out with a blackout after a minor blip in the grid caused either in Ohio or Canada depending on who you believe to identify the negligent party.

What do you think will happen when a dozen plants come offline at about the same time due to lack of water?

Note, when they come off line, its not going to be for a glitch. They can’t just fill up the lakes and rivers and bring them online. Absent a few hurricanes they would come offline and stay off line. We often tend to think of global warming from the perspective of too much water, flooding Florida and all those Condo Hotels along the beach on A1A Highway, but running out of water is an equally large problem and one that might happen much sooner.

In many ways we are a country of addicts.  We are addicted to gas and oil and the oil of others at that.  Our addiction has led to wars and it has empowered people like Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez to turn democracies into dictatorships. 

Similarly, we are addicted to Incumbents.  An incumbent is 98% likely to be elected over a new challenger.  Money is a primary reason for this and no small amount of that money comes from oil.  The two are linked at the hip and this largely influenced the election of 2000 and the subsequent wars and race away from democracy. 

It could be argued that President Bush has done more to trample the growth of democracy in the name of democracy than any other person in the last 100 years.  Vladimir Lenin might come in a close second to Bush, but where Lenin would attempt to build something powerful enough to counter Democracy, Bush has worked to tear down democracy both in the US and abroad.

Our addiction to oil has brought us harbingers of oil.  The oil pushers paid for by lobbyists and 80 year old family relationships that renew the power base of those same pushers and the oil producers.  There is no drug rehabilitation for our addiction.  We must suffer our addictions and perish from it or find a way to over come it ourselves.