"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK."
With increasing regularity, liberals assert that Americans must conform to the wishes of the world. We are hated, according to liberal doctrine, because of our failure to go along to get along. To paraphrase Obama, we are 3% of the global population consuming 25% of the world's resources. For the record, both of those percentages are inacurate - we comprise a larger percentage of the world population and consume a smaller percentage of the resources - but that's a topic for another day. The point is, we are selfish and greedy, the bully in the coatroom, bent on keeping the little guys down to feed our own voracious appetites. This they condemn emphatically.
Yet, consider their stance on the current energy crisis. We do drive our SUV's and heat and cool our homes, much to their dismay, and we have a vital and thriving economy which demands enormous amounts of energy. The primary source of that energy is oil, and far and away the bulk of the oil that drives our economy is imported from other nations. Global demand for oil is dramatically rising (apparently we aren't quite as efficient at oppressing the other guys as they would have us believe, since the little guys are also consuming vast amounts of energy to drive their own vital and thriving economies), and the increased demand is resulting, naturally, in increased costs. The only realistic relief for this dilemma is to dramatically increase the supply of oil that is available.
We are sitting on oil reserves of unimaginable size. Offshore, in ANWR, the Dakotas, shale oil...the list is long. Yet, we aren't accessing this oil. We have the technology. We have the means. We certainly have the desire. Still, billions of barrels of this desperately needed resource lie untapped beneath our land and seas. Why? Because we don't want to destroy even a few acres of our precious, pristine environment. Because we can't possibly consider risking a minor inconvenience to wildlife by using a tiny fraction of an arctic wasteland to extract that oil. Because we wouldn't dream of risking an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (although China is drilling in our Gulf). There are no better reasons than these. The liberals in Congress have blocked, time and again, efforts to open up our own reserves, to improve our refining capability, to generate more of our energy through nuclear power plants (by far the cleanest energy source known to man).
Consider for a moment how the rest of the world must see this reluctance to despoil our precious lands. We care not at all if their lands are spoiled. We simply expect them to provide what we need to survive as a nation without so much as a thought of the environmental consequences they may be suffering. Perhaps the reality is that they aren't suffering any environmental consequences - perhaps, as would be the case in ANWR and 200 miles off the Florida coast, their oil fields are not harming their lands. Perhaps the considerable slice of our Gross Domestic Product that finds its way to their coffers is more than adequate compensation for any tiny inconvenience a few acres of oil wells here and there pose. How ridiculous we must seem; how incredibly hypocritical, self-centered and short-sighted.
Such ignorance will be the downfall of our nation. At least, when we are facing economic destruction, we will have the comfort of knowing that the frozen tundra that is ANWR remains as barren, and pristine, as ever.
