Oil: Our Nations Tainted Blood

     Every day the United States consumes 19.6 million barrels of oil 60% of which is from foreign countries torn by war and poverty. This precious resource of oil, along with coal and natural gas accounts for 85% of the U.S. total energy. Can our nation maintain our energy policy the way things are going? Importing millions of barrels of oil from tyrants in the middle east and having the prices increased on American citizens as a result of all the conflicts that go on there, is no way for a nation to sustain itself.
     The Middle Eastern region has been plunged into even greater war and chaos since the rise of the Egyptian people against their ,one time leader Hosni Mubbarack. Since then riots and revolutions have broken out in Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Algeria, Iraq and other countries in the region resulting in the skyrocketing of oil prices to well over $100 per barrel. Bahrain especially should be considered by the United States as a high value conflict because it is right on the border of the largest oil exporter in the world ,Saudi Arabia, who has sent ground troops to stop the rebellion against ruling family of Bahrain. Because of the great U.S. dependency on foreign oil especially from Saudi Arabia the U.S. can do nothing to help the people of Bahrain stand up against the Saudi and their own government Saudi Arabia is swamped in a vast multitude of human rights violations and uses the Mahabith , the Saudi Arabia secret police, to enforce sharia law and execute anyone who might be a threat to the state. In essence the U.S. is completely tied to the whims of the oil exporting countries in the Middle East and is forced to work with them in spite of the fact that they are vehemently against the values of human freedom that America is supposed to stand for.
     The American dependency on foreign oil is not only compromising our values on international policy and subjecting the American people to higher oil prices but is economically damaging areas of the United States that could easily make money off of oil drilling in their region. Currently a moratorium is on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico where massive oil reserves are being kept just off the coast of the United States. This moratorium was put back in place after being repealed for only a few months as a result of the BP oil spill and the economic and environmental catastrophe that it caused.
     The BP oil spill could have been prevented very easily were there just a bit more oversight on the oil company's safety procedures and far less inefficiency and bureaucracy in government procedures to clean up the spill in its early stages. The problem is not off shore drilling itself but how it is handled. If the U.S. government paid greater attention to the issues with offshore drilling as opposed to simply trying to dispose of it all together, many rural and poor areas of the United States could bring in considerable revenue and become economically stable and U.S. energy needs would be completely met.

This blog post may be a very shallow scratch on the surface of American Energy issues but it serves as an introduction to it and an expression of my opinion of how we could improve the state of our union.


Why not bend over a little more Obama. America should not be bowing to the monarch of a state that has a human rights record written in the blood of women whose ankles were showing in public.