20/20 on ABC: Over a Barrel: U.S. Oil Addiction

I was floored by the clips of every President since Nixon saying we would achieve energy independence under their guidance. That makes our lack of progress more depressing.

I enjoyed T. Boone Pickens' take on "drill baby drill".

I hope people who weren't already aware of the problem watched the show and learned something.

 

Did Reagan say this before or after he removed the solar collectors from the White House?

I often wonder where we would be today if we had stuck to Carter's Energy policy. We could have avoided two wars in the Middle East and we would not be sending $700 Billion to our enemies for oil.

 

Thank you for posting this... !

 

Memory is stale, but I noted that the sequence missed a president or two. I think Reagan was one of the missing.

 

They showed Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush. George H. W. Bush was the only one missing.

 

Hi All,

This 20/20 piece is timely. With the Cash-4-Clunkers program I see lots of people going out and buying the same-ol stale out-of-date fuel consumption technology. I do like seeing allot of those 1990's full-sized vans getting dumped though.

The main reason gas is cheap right now is demand is down. This is no reason to buy a cheap car that uses allot of gas, however.

Its clear to me that the sustainable economic activity levels are tightly tied to overhead costs, of which imported transportation fuels is a very large part. I am no economist, but it seems that now we are off the housing appreitiation bubble (the equivalent of economic cocaine), there has to be real improvements to get things going again. Stagnant production levels are only going to be improved in economic results if these overhead/unit production is reduced.

The road to an improved economy is almost always doing more with less. And one of the biggest oportunities to do more with less is halving one's fuel consumption with a Prius. Every gallon of gas saved per week by commuters is going to be money in the US economy to put people to work.

As a country we need to try to hold down those gas prices, and this means using less of it , in all portions of economic cycles / catastrophes. Even when its cheap, not only when its expensive.

 

We consume 25% of the world's oil, but we also produce 22% of the world's GDP. (And we provide markets for significant chunks of China's 12% of world GDP, etc.)

That says something about the wealth we've enjoyed and a consumer mentality, but I don't think it means what many people think it means.

Considering that the vast majority of both countries live in poverty and could not own a car, and considering the lack of infrastructure, it makes a lot of sense. Not saying it's good or bad, just that it makes sense economically.