Is that pit bull wearing lipstick?

I must be a masochist, I watched the lipstick-wearing pitbull hockey mom Sarah Palin last night. There was a lot of things that I disagreed with, was angered by, and thought was flat out ridiculous, but there are two things that stood out most to me, and I’d like to devote a couple of blogs to them. First, energy.

These people have the biggest hard-on for offshore drilling ever, when reports have shown that offshore drilling will be largely ineffective. It will take time to get these sources generating oil, and once they do, it will not solve our oil dependency. The amounts of oil potentially generated by these sites may not warrant the investment needed to get them producing. I imagine by the time these sources are producing, (if they produce any significant amount) our need will have expanded, as it continues to do, and then we will be back at square one only minus natural environments and tourism in Alaska and Florida.

Instead, doesn’t it make much more sense to develop new sources of energy? I can’t fathom the focus on retaining this obviously malfunctioning system. Yes, it makes us rely on other countries when we shouldn’t be. It involves us in foreign affairs that we shouldn’t be involved in. It leads to pollution and destruction of the environment. Imagine if the oil producing countries decided to cut us off. What would we do then? They could sell the oil to other countries, I imagine. China’s demand for oil is rising every day. We are not the strong, autonomous nation that we believe that we are.

Focusing our energy on developing new technologies in order to provide us with the fuel that we need seems to be a much more sound idea. There are many benefits. We would become self-reliant, which is hugely important. We would greatly profit from the new technologies. Aren’t we a capitalist country? We’re talking big time money to be made from these developments We would once again be industry leaders, leaders in the development of innovations, which hasn’t been very true for a long time. It would lead to more jobs than offshore drilling. It would be a great help in curbing the effects of global warming and the damage that is being caused by our current reality.

Longwinded, I know, but the current attitude about oil makes no sense to me. The only logical explanation for why we haven’t moved on is the amount of money that the oil companies spread around to keep the system in place.