Get Off Oil: Foreign Policy September-October 2010

Get Off Oil







Americans borrow $1 billion a day to import oil. Oil can cause environmental problems that soon become permanent. Studies put the cost of dealing with gasoline as extremely expensive because gasoline is composed of benzene, toluene, and xylene, which studies say affect our health, like shortening our life spans. Studies also show that cancer is caused by these three chemicals in gasoline. Oil not only causes health problems, but it also costs a lot of money to buy and to import.




American politicians have said that “foreign oil” or oil from places other than the U.S. is a problem. Unfortunately, the American politicians have come up with either expensive or impossible solutions to get rid of foreign oil. Thus the matter is left unsolved. Drilling for oil in the U.S. may help with some of the U.S. payments for foreign oil , but it won’t help with undermining O.P.E.C.’s control of the oil market. When the U.S. pays for oil, most of the oil goes to transportation like cars, trucks and buses, but only 2% of the oil goes to making electricity which is where politicians are focussing their policies on. The only environmental policy that Obama has found to discourage high-carbon emissions is a program called “cap and trade”. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Obama will get his policy passed through Congress.




Obama can turn to a portfolio of other steps that he can use to find solutions to get the U.S. off oil sooner. For example there is hydrogen. Hydrogen is good because it is quicker ????.




Here are 5 things he can do now:

1. Boost the popularity of plug-in hybrid cars
2. Transform vehicles that travel all the time like buses into natural gas users
3. Allow alternative fuel to be purchased like alcohol based fuel.
4. Require more efficient forms of eternal combustion engines
5. Encourage car companies to use carbon composite materials when building their cars. This will make the car lighter and will require smaller engines to propel them.
   
   If Obama were to use these solutions, he may reduce the amount of oil transported to the U.S. by 10% over the next decade which could shatter the oil companies’ transportation monopoly, which is about 95% in the U.S.. If Obama doesn’t take action soon, Americans will have a harder life than ever. For example, Americans will fall into greater debt, contribute to climate and environmental changes and will give themselves even more health problems than they already have.