Realization No. 1, there is no "American" energy.
The US has believe in and pushed for "free trade" and campaigned for it for decades. We should congradulate ourselves, because we have gotten our wish, at the worst possible time, when other ecconomies are growing at 2 to 5 times the rate of ours. The trillions of dollars we have spent in those economies, are able to buy materials, including fuel materials, on an open world market at whatever price they need to pay to keep their economies growing. Free trade has put Americans in economic competit
ion with every other growing market in the world and as Americans, we find ourselves on the tail end of the dog. There is a direct coorelation between per capita income and energy use, as can be seen in the attached graphic with data from the International Energy Agency. The intent is not to be alarmist, just to face the facts are that are not reported by the press or the politicians.
ion with every other growing market in the world and as Americans, we find ourselves on the tail end of the dog. There is a direct coorelation between per capita income and energy use, as can be seen in the attached graphic with data from the International Energy Agency. The intent is not to be alarmist, just to face the facts are that are not reported by the press or the politicians. The graph counts all forms of energy consumed on a per capita basis and has some interesting things to note. Americans use half again more energy per capita than most of the other people in the developed world. And down in the lower left corner are 2.4 billion people in India, China, and Brazil, (8 times the population of the USA) who are moving up the economic prosperity curve, doubling every seven years, so that in about 14 to 20 years these people will consume 32 times the energy that the USA consumes today. While Goldman Sachs is predicting oil will hit $200 per barrel by 2010, its going to get a lot worse because when we look around that world market, the conventional energy resources just are not there at any price, and in the "free trade" world, those resources that we are standing on in America will be sold out from under our feet and shipped to the highest bidder. T. Boon Pickins, (see pickinsplan.org), is right in that we must begin now to develop alternatives at the highest rate possible and to protect and thoughtfully allocate the resources we have.
