Energy Initiatives
The 3 E’s of my Energy Initiatives:
- Expansion of Drilling
- Expansion of Nuclear Energy
- Expansion of Research
Failure to expand Drilling, Nuclear energy and Research will lead us to issue a DNR – Do Not Resuscitate order for Energy independence.
The talk of wind and solar are nice, but they have absolutely nothing to do with our dependence on imported oil. While wind and solar power are noble in their cause, I call them the “Feel Good Energy.” The wind blowing through your hair feels good and the sun shining on your face feels good. While they are fairly clean sources of energy, they are not 100% reliable and thus they require 100% duplication of reserve capacity from other sources. We all know the sun does not shine every day and the wind does not blow all day long, which begs the question – “What are you going to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?”
It takes years – up to a decade – to bring new sources of oil and gas to the market. We need to open more federal land to drilling as well as more offshore sites. The beautiful pictures you see of ANWAR are NOT where drilling is proposed. The drilling area is the barren tundra and if you can picture a postage stamp on a football field, the entire football field is ANWAR and the postage stamp would be the drilling site.
As with current governmental policy, royalties are paid by the oil companies for drilling on federal land. By the way, “federal land” is code for land owned by you and I, the American people. The revenue from these new royalties needs to go into 3 equal buckets – 1) assistance for the expansion of nuclear energy, 2) research into alternative transportation fuels and 3) directly to paying down the national debt – while at least holding spending level, and it would be even better to start cutting spending.
We do not yet know what the long term viable alternative to petroleum based transportation fuels will be. Ethanol is clearly not the answer for many reasons. The most significant reason is it’s almost a one-to-one yield because it takes almost as much energy to produce a unit of energy as you get out of the ethanol produced. In addition, we should not be converting food crops to fuel. The switchgrass and algae based bio-fuels may become viable, but maybe it will be something altogether different such as hydrogen. In any case, all of these require vast amounts of energy to produce, especially hydrogen. Without the expansion of nuclear energy for electrical production, we will be unable to effectively and efficiently produce the energy required to make these fuels. From the day a viable alternative for petroleum based fuels is discovered, it will be at least 10 years before it is pervasive throughout the market and 20 years before it is dominant which means we will need continued drilling on our lands and shores for decades to come.
For decades, the issue of Energy Independence has been talked about, yet nothing ever gets done. Continued failure to act by the representatives in Washington has led to a weakened national security and economy. I am here to help reverse that trend. We do need to “Drill Here, Drill Now,” but that alone is not enough.
My approach to energy policy will act as a jobs creation and cash retention program. By reducing our dependence on foreign sources of oil, we will keep more money circulating within the U.S. (and less with the sponsors of terrorism). By drilling more here in the U.S. we will keep more of those jobs here, as opposed to sending them to Brazil’s coast for example, as we do when our government gives money to the IMF to help fund the drilling of a recent discovery there. There is plenty of irony there because our same government will not expand drilling off of our coasts. Keep in mind, it can take up to 10 years or more to bring new deep water offshore platforms online and producing at full capacity. We need to get started now.
