The United States is poised to become energy independent by the year 2020. Our friend to the north has already achieved this goal. Canadians don’t enjoy many perks because of it though. Hopes of lower fuel prices for us or them would be false ones. The oil market is international. CEO’s aren’t going to suddenly dislike making billions and billions of dollars and lower the price at the pump.
Natural gas is booming, but the infrastructure to support it must be established in the newly-tapped reserves, and the up-front cost isn’t cheap. And then there are the pesky side effects. Companies maintain there is no proof of side effects, causing moderate to severe health problems in the regions where natural gas is booming like the gold rush of ’49.
Few americans were directly affected by the new pipeline stretching south from Canada, but the ones that were might have a battle in the century to come. Environmentalists continue to find horrific coverups in the two cleanup efforts to pipe breakages. The Keystone XL pipeline company claimed breaks would only happen once every 100 years, but those two occurred less than 10 years apart.
The Keystone XL pipeline is bringing a whole new issue flowing into America. The oil comes from the Tar Sands Oil Project. Environmentally, it’s genocide to all life forms. Water is pumped deep into the ground after forests have been clear-cut. Oil rises out of the ground and is suctioned up and filtered.
The independence part no longer interests me on a national scale, and it shouldn’t for you either. For at least the past 12 years you’ve done what you should have. Whatever it was, it got you here. So what did you do with your new-found individuality, besides gotten a stupid tattoo and some skinny jeans in rebellion to those conservative commies you call parents? Not much really. This has absolutely nothing to do with energy sources. Right you are. But, it does.
Go off the grid, get your own solar panels, or make them. Recycle the water from your shower to your garden fed with organic compost from the bin made from old pallets found behind the supermarket. Cut and weld scrap metal until you no longer notice the blood on your hands. Eventually that windmill will provide the spark of electricity you’ve been searching for. The next real energy independence will not come on a national level, as a corporate mandate, or in the aftermath of a natural disaster. It will sprout out of small neighborhoods in rural communities and college study groups. This is the time, not for national independence, but a time for revolutionary individual freedom from a civilization of conformity and stagnation. Be energy independent, and be free.
