In Part I we learned that the Chinese are the new kids on the block in the global oil supply equation. Some economists and diplomats saw it coming, but we Americans are well practiced in a sense of entitlement to more than our share of the world’s resources. As a wealthy nation, why shouldn’t we continue to produce or buy anything our hearts desired?

Considering that the price of oil affects nearly every other commodity because of transportation costs, the current price of a barrel of oil and, eventually, the price of gas at the pump, is sending collective shivers up the spines of America. It has become a big talking point in the 2012 election. The American Way of Life is being threatened. How can we save it?

Returning to Candy Crowley’s February 26 interview with John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil, we learn the need of a comprehensive solution, a “fixit plan.” It reads like one of those story problems back in sixth grade.

According to Hofmeister, “Our daily usage is 20 million barrels a day. We produce seven. We used to produce 10. We need to produce 10 again. We have the oil to produce 10 for decades to come.”
O.K. So, let’s say we ARE producing 10 million barrels a day; where do the remaining 10 come from? Hofmeister says we could adopt a solution proposed by the U. S. Energy Security Council and turn our supplies of natural gas into methanol and ethanol, which would power flex-fuel engines. That would deliver the equivalent of four to five million gallons per day.

That takes us to 15 million barrels a day. Higher efficiency vehicles could save another two million barrels, bringing us to 17. And for the remaining three, we could look to our border friends Canada and Mexico. At this, Hofmeister chortles, “We’re at 20. We could tell OPEC to take a hike….By 2020 we could be on our way.”
Hofmeister is not the only one with a multiple-approach solution. President Obama spelled out his ideas on February 25 in his weekly address. As advertised, it is an “all-of-the-above approach.”

He doesn’t promise that we’ll go back to $2 gas, but if we’re willing to embrace new attitudes toward conserving the precious and limited resources we are blessed with, we will have a future we can embrace.

It’s true, America is rich in resources. They include rich deposits of coal and shale oil. When we speak of China, think how such “dirty” and unrenewable energy sources have polluted that vast country. It’s true, the Chinese are clever, and the government is investing heavily in alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. They are now the leaders in this vital area. To the Chinese, Solyndra is not a dirty word.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Click here to vote for President Obama’s American Jobs Act

As the Republican presidential candidates continue to engage in a mutually-assured destruction pact, President Obama’s reelection chances seem to be threatened mainly by the rising cost and plummeting supply of crude oil. Sensing blood, candidates and Congressional leaders alike sound agreement on the need to drill ourselves out of our predicament. They unite in support of the Keystone XL pipeline as the solution to all our problems. The debacle of Solyndra and the chaos in the Middle East are laid at the door of the Obama presidency. What is to be done?

The baby-boomer generation and its forebears remember with fear and loathing the energy crises of the 1970s—skyrocketing prices, long lines, and even coupons (though they were never used). The issues that contributed to those problems were largely political and thus subject to eventual resolution. (Now we can read accounts of the gas glut of the 80s.) But the salient point regarding the crisis we face today is that it is not mainly political, and it cannot be solved by either aggression or negotiation.

This discussion on the energy situation in the U. S. was carried forward Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, hosted by Candy Crowley. Her guest was John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil and author of Why We Hate the Oil Companies. He states, “What has changed dramatically…are the actual statistics of China’s demand. And then he proceeds to do the math.

To summarize, China’s consumption has grown, from four million barrels a day 10 years ago, to nine million barrels a day last year. By 2015, demand will reach 15 million barrels a day. Cleverly, in the last three years China granted $120 billion in loans to state-owned oil companies in various countries, guaranteeing their future supply at protected prices. In the U. S. demand is down six percent, but our prices are skyrocketing. Hofmeister predicts, “It’s going to stay that way, and it could get worse in 2014 and 2015 as well.”

In Part II we’ll discuss Hofmeister’s advice, along with solutions laid out by President Obama.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Click here to vote for President Obama’s American Jobs Act

The name of J. Edgar Hoover, even though it adorns FBI headquarters, carries with it a whiff of sulfur. It conveys images of countless dossiers filled with private details ready to blackmail persons of high degree if “The Man” deemed it necessary. The Man is dead. But his legacy lives on.

The right to privacy, set forth in the Fourth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, is just as important in the present as it was in Hoover’s time. But it continues under attack by means not available until social media gained its present state of development. As the first of this two-part article brought out, persons at the highest levels of government are known to use devious methods to achieve the security of the general population.

Since June of 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice has been quietly lobbying for record retention requirements on Internet service providers. “To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCIPA), even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.”

PCIPA violates American’s first and fourth Amendments rights. This Orwellian bill would require commercial Internet providers to store customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses for one year. It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.

Congressional Justice Department lackeys are using child pornography as a human shield in violation of American’s first and fourth amendment rights. “The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”
Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said the data retention requirements are easily avoided because they only apply to “commercial” providers. “Criminals would simply go to libraries or Starbucks coffeehouses and use the Web anonymously,” she said, “while law-abiding Americans would have their activities recorded.”

America can’t be fooled by such attempts to abridge our basic liberties under the guise of law enforcement. We will not permit our nation to slide into a police state. We have learned from J. Edgar Hoover’s misguided methods, and we won’t be going there again.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Click here to vote for President Obama’s American Jobs Act