Shale oil – a cry for help

While scanning the news stations this morning I came across a very disturbing interview with Newt Gingrich talking about gas prices and oil in this country. Obviously oil prices are higher then they have ever been and continue to climb at a very alarming rate as all of us know every time we have to go to the gas station. Our current administration’s solution to this has been to ask the foreign governments that supply us with this oil to please increase production so we don’t have to pay so much. They, for obvious reasons, said no. Now, to try to solve this problem some are saying we should use our own supply of oil, namely the shale oil we have here in this country. According to this interview, we have millions of gallons of oil locked up in shale just ready to be harvested but the right to do this is being blocked by environmentalists and democrats. Essentially, the environmentalists and the democrats are causing the prices of oil and gas to go higher and are blocking solutions to the problem.
First of all, I don’t claim to be a geologist, but if we are forced to start squeezing oil out of rocks, isn’t it time to maybe look somewhere else for our energy? Secondly, if extracting oil out of shale had been easy to do wouldn’t have we have done it long before this? Harvesting shale oil seems a little like a pretty desperate cry for help from a nation that is trying very hard to hang on to its addiction to oil.
The interview went onto say that environmentalists are ultimately celebrating the rising fuel costs, forcing us all to live in a declining economy. To this I would have to agree that as much as I don’t like paying nearly four dollars a gallon for gas, I am happy to see that we Americans are starting to feel the pain of higher oil prices. Why am I happy? Well, essentially the only way to force change in this nation is to get the public upset, and the only way to truly do that in this society is to hurt our spending power. I am hoping, as I believe all environmentalists are, that the rising fuel prices will be a catalyst for change, forcing us down a path to look for alternative energy sources and curbing our current excessive use.
Extracting shale oil is not the solution to our rising oil prices, but a desperate cry for help, a cry that is hopefully answered not by more desperate attempts to retain our addiction to oil, but by true research into renewable energy that will break our addiction forever. Then again, this is just life according to Troy.