Recently Obama declared that he'd be clearing the way for more domestic oil drilling to help ease our struggles at the gas pump. This should be an opportunity to point out that every time a middle eastern oil supply is endangered, we get pinched for gas prices, and why don't we extract ourselves from oil dependency itself? No, no. Let's not waste our time on renewable energy sources. Instead, let's just drill more inside our own borders. The environmental degradation will be permanent, and the fuel source will be temporary at best. Just because it's not a good trade-off for our future, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
Another crappy element to this situation is that "clearing the way" really means giving more (taxpayer) money to oil companies as an incentive to go tearing around the continent, drilling, spilling, polluting and destroying in search of oil profits. In case no one noticed, BP never really paid for the huge mess they made of the Gulf of Mexico, and there's really nothing preventing them or anyone else from doing the exact same thing again.
Let's not forget the fact that our use of fossil fuels is causing global warming. We obviously do forget that one of the most necessary tools for fighting global warming is maintaining and increasing our forests. Meanwhile, Obama has stated plans for increasing logger access to our forest lands. This is depressing. Recently, I drove in the Mt. Hood area, looking for access to Lost Lake (turned out it was still blocked by snow), and in one particularly scenic area happened upon a really revolting, giant chunk of clear-cut land. It was hideous - it looked like a huge splat of death in the forest. Then I noticed a chunk of trees nearby, that were strangely all the same height and clearly the same tree species. This was the effect of earlier replanting, a stand of trees with no biological diversity. The fact that they were in an area where clear-cutting was frequently happening meant that there were most likely no wildlife being supported by this undiverse christmas tree lot.
It's frustrating that humanity is so uncreative and so destructive to everything around us. Next: how using cellphone is killing us and all the bees. Then: Human population overload, redux.
