Friday, August 12, 2005

Can we develop those alternate fuels now?

Dear Mr. President,

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the price of gas is getting cripplingly high for many of us in America.

It's reaching the point where we're reassessing not just recreational travel plans, but how much we use the car at all. It's driving up the costs of food, clothes and everything else that has to be transported from somewhere else to here.

It's bad enough for the middle class. I shudder to think of what it must be like for the working class and the unemployed who already are struggling to pay their bills. This isn't the time to drill for oil in the Arctic, or time to hope that freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein so that Shi'a clerics can establish a harsh theocracy is going to bring new fuel into the country.

We're at the point that we should be using heavily fuel sources that require fewer fossil fuels or none at all.

Think you could spare a thought for us working families, instead of for your friends and campaign donors in the oil industry?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forgot the part where as part of the system YOU are part to blame. True? Where is the team work in this?

marauder34 said...

A most salient point. Since, as a liberal I believe that everything is my fault, I've been hard at work at those very things.

Since the government has been so tardy with its own support for R&D into alternative-fuel vehicles, I've been pouring billions of my own money into the project.

Because metropolitan public transportation is so well developed here in New Jersey, I take the train everywhere.

Because the auto industry has developed fuel cell cars, pressurized-air-propelled cars and biodiesel cars and made them widely available throughout the market, I drive only those.

Seriously, what have I done? What I can. I carpool when I can, try to eliminate needless trips, drive a relatively fuel-efficient car, and as a newspaper editor and writer, I've roasted SUV drivers and commended people who buy hybrids, and called for movement away from an oil-driven fuel base.

But until someone in a position to take the lead on the first three points actually does so, there's a limit to how much I can do.

Or did you just assume without any basis that I'm a hypocrite who likes to blame everything on Bush?