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Sustainable energies now a day casually referred as renewable sources of energies which exclude fossil fuels and nuclear fission. Sustainable or renewable energy essentially includes biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydro power, solar power, tidal power, wave power, wind power and such.

Oil Economy

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US is the largest oil consumer of the world and heavily depends on oil. On the other hand, even Europe is big consumer of oil, they are not as depended as US is. This could be partially attributed to geographical location and public transportation system. For example, in Europe there are public transportation is available virtually any cities compared to in US public transportation is abundant only in bigger cities. There for there more car per capita in US than in Europe.

Oil Politics

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Us is still is depending on oil is largely due to “oil politics” at home and aboard that US takes part of. US is apparently making no significant movement to change it due to stakes the oil companies and it’s investors hold and often times lot of the stake holders of the oil companies are also in directly related to decision makers or the politicians. Many people in this country still speculate the relation between current vice president Dick Cheney and the oil company Halliburton [1].

Lack of interest in alternative energy

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US is technological leader in many different products and commodities. US is the ultimate inventor of many different modern transportation.

Technologically it is not extremely challenging to have efficient electrical and other sustainable energy vehicle but US is not making any move for some reason.

Solar energy easily can be a big source in US but there is not big program to achieve this goal.

Strategic Interest

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US also may have strategic interest to stick with oil. US has strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) for the case of emergency [2].

National Economic Strength

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In general US’s national economic strength is much stronger than all the European countries. European countries started to look into alternative energy sources as a defense mechanism in order to economically sustain. On the contrary, may be US leadership thinks that US can ride out the oil crisis and does not need to look into alternative sources due to the strength of it’s economy.

There are so many problems with the US right now. We have built our entire country on petroleum products and we never really planned for the day when it wouldn’t be around any more. The problem is that we have so much invested in non-sustainable energies that a change to sustainable energies would take a herculean effort and a great deal of money.

Another huge problem is our political ties with oil. All of our politicians (including our president) get tons of money from big oil. Why don’t we have electric cars? So much of our country still relies on petroleum when it doesn’t need to.

The war in Iraq and many other problems can be related to our countries reliance on petroleum. If we are going to change quickly, it is going to take one heck of an innovation (wave energy). I think that the day the US stops relying on petroleum is the day that we run out of it.”

We need a “Plan B” for sources of energy before “Plan A” runs out. I absolutely agree with Michael that US needs to stop relying on petroleum and focus on sustainable energies. The first step towards this goal would be to realize the truth as a country. And, also make sure that our government realizes that time for “Plan B” is now, not later.

Off shore drilling could be great idea but why invest more money in a dead technology. Why not invest that money towards coming up with cars that can run entirely by electricity and/or solar power? Why not make steps towards where solar panels are standard for every house. It will be costly but it may be worthwhile to spend the money now on this than spend money on off shore drilling which essentially cost fortune to the US tax payers but ultimately oil companies would rip the profit.

Sources:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton#Ties_with_U.S._Vice_President_Dick_Cheney

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve

[3] http://www.mvandersommen.com/models/images/sustainable.jpg

Date: October 3, 2008