Natural gas can not be strip mined.

Since it is already a gas, contaminants are easily removed from natural gas before it is used—-unlike coal and petroleum. Natural gas causes no pollution when used—-it can even be used to cook on indoors, and millions of people do.

Any internal combustion engine can run on natural gas. We’ve been doing it for over 90 years.

It costs about 1/2 the amount to drive the same distance with natural gas that it does using petroleum.

Natural gas is abundant, with more reserves than coal, and we can easily make methane(natural gas) from any type of organic material—-it is both a fossil fuel, AND a renewable fuel.

Surely no one is blaming us consumers, are they? :-O

They are carpet baggers who pull out of their home port on their huge gas guzzling yachts and sail luxuriously to the Caribbean or South Pacific – the last places on earth they haven’t totally destroyed. Don’t turn your State over to the vultures raping our land.

Paul Burke
Author-Journey Home

The percentages of actual oil produced by this offshore drilling is laughable yet politicians, oil companies, and talking points try to distort the insignificance of this new energy source into something meaningful.

Second point of stupidity most think that all oil produced in the U.S. gets refined and passed on to the American consumer, not true as sometimes it is traded on a global market and shipped to other countries.

An idiotic political commission will investigate the wrong-doings and delay findings long enough so the American Public forgets about this or there will be a simple slap-on the wrist and finger pointing/tough talk to BP in front of cameras while in the backroom deals are brokered to make the plan go forward. We are seeing this same political show with Goldman Sachs and committees in Congress yet no real meaningful regulations will come out of any of this. Believing tough talk leads to rational action is the next form of stupidity that voters and the media eat up.

Next point regulators don’t regulate. We see this everywhere as money not ethics or enforcing common statues dictates how companies get fined or coming up with new worthless regulations that do nothing to prevent more accidents. Often if regulations are meaningful they are simply tossed aside by lobbying (eg. in this case with BP/American Petroleum Institute against the Interior Department)

The last point of stupidity is solid regulations that curve unethical behavior has a price to it. We would see this with tougher regulations in the coal, petroleum, banking ect… industries these regulations have economic costs related to them. Reforming worker safety standards, protecting investors, or consumers may mean higher prices to the consumer but I argue smarter more stable long-term growth could occur from this. If politicians and consumers don’t want to risk higher prices or reductions in our economy for the sake of only short-term interests and gain, that restricts any possibility for change and we continue the cycle of stupidity.

Sorry for being pessimistic but sometimes I wonder who safeguards our democracy from abuses of power when every politician is afraid to bit the hand that feeds them or risk telling voters what really needs to be done. Too bad third parties in the U.S. are only for the fringe as I see only politicians not leaders in this country and they are slowly dismantling what our founding fathers fought for. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back to more commonsense and rational thinking someday in the near future.