This article originally appeared about 15 years ago on my former site About Facts and is still true today in many ways. Big Oil Oil, is the life blood of the industrial nations, right? The question is whether it really is a commodity we cannot live without, or a business conspiracy that has been forced upon us. Were we indoctrinated to believe oil is an absolute necessity? At the very least, maybe we could get away with using only a fraction of the amount we use today? Did you know most of the power plants use coal, not oil, to fuel themselves? I remember during the oil crisis, when there were long lines at all the pumps, a certain individual was caught sending oil out on tankers, this is domestic oil, and then having them come back to the US so he could say the oil was imported and get much more money for it under government regulations at the time. He was caught and punished. The price of oil, in the form of fuel, is not the full price of the product. When you are forking over to the gas station attendant over two dollars a gallon for gas there are other costs that most are not aware of. Some of your taxes are going to subsidize the oil companies. Here is how that works. The government has programs that reduce corporate taxes for the oil industry. The government also funds certain programs which only benefit companies that produce petroleum products. Then there is the cost of cleaning up the pollution caused by the usage of petroleum products. In the 1990s imported oil was responsible for half of our trade deficit. It is hard to fight the big multinational oil companies; they have plenty of money to hire lobbyists in Washington to push anything they want. When the tax rate rules are studied one finds the average rate of taxes paid by the oil industry is about 11% which is considerably lower than other industries. Some oil companies are still pushing for oil changes in autos at 3,000 mile intervals. Remember, the faster you change your oil, the more money the oil companies make. This is not to say that you shouldn't change your oil. Some automobiles like Honda recommend a change every 7,500 miles. Are their alternatives to using oil and gasoline as fuel? Before we start to answer that question, let's be sure we understand what we are talking about here. We have a very well developed system of refueling stations all across our country for cars and trucks. I don't know how many of these stations exist, but there must be hundreds of thousands of them across the country. The oil industry counts on this to discourage others from trying to change the type of fuel that is used in vehicles. They believe a whole new infrastructure of fueling stations would be needed, a task that, they believe is almost impossible. Think about it, we have been using gas stations for over 100 years now. But what if we could somehow use the existing stations to offer alternate fuels? This would be very hard to do since many of them are either owned by the oil companies, or the operators are under contract with the companies. Even if an independent operator wanted to handle an alternate fuel, what would he do if his regular supplier of gasoline refused to deliver? This is a very big problem. Some of the alternatives might be: Big Oil has connections all through the government, how can any reasonable person ever believe we will ever change over from oil to another type of fuel anytime soon? The oil producing nations, especially those in the middle east, play us like a violin. It if wasn't for all that oil, do you think we would ever have let them get away with some of those things they did. What am I talking about? I think we all know big oil countries are supporting our enemies, it’s been in the news enough times. Are these countries exerting undue influence over our national policies? At times it certainly seems that way. Saudi Arabia is one of our most important allies in the middle east. Would this normally be true of a non-democratic country that doesn't allow dissent? You bet it wouldn't unless that country had huge oil reserves. The truth of the matter is that we have very few friends anywhere in the world. Oh yes, we have business relationships and we support certain countries for strategic or political reasons, but friends? The proof of this is certain so called friends of ours have been caught spying on us over and over again. I don't want to get off topic here so let me get back to big oil. The multinational oil companies are almost like countries themselves. They have offices all over the world and I believe they feel they owe no allegiance to any single country. In some ways they have more power than some countries. This is economic power of course I am talking about. They have the money to influence the governments of the world. They are chipping away at protected lands all over the globe and making them accessible to their drill. As the supply of oil recedes, the price increases so the profit margin will increase. The oil industry has even managed to crack the European market pricing system. If one looks at petrol prices across Europe, not only are they very high, but they are different in each country. This fact seems to go against the very premise of the European Union. One of the reasons we haven't seen a huge difference in gas prices even though the US is getting into bigger, gas guzzling, vehicles like SUVs is we have been lucky. It seems Europe is not using as much gasoline anymore since they are using more diesel fuel. They are increasing their exports of gasoline to us. But beware, this is said to only be a temporary move and when it stops the full force of upping the amount of gasoline we are using will hit home in the form of higher prices. Big oil is just standing on the sidelines awaiting their time and they know it will come. The middle eastern countries will be seeing dollar signs as well. Remember some of this money has to fall into the hands of terrorists giving them more resources, just what we don't want to happen. This is a great country and if it really wanted to break the dependence on oil, I am betting it could. We have plenty of coal to power our plants. We have plenty of water power in the forms of 30,000 dams both large and small which could contain generators, in some areas wind power would work. The wind could turn huge blades that turn generators. Wave generating machines at shoreline locations are another way of generating electricity as are solar cells and solar mirrors. The solar mirrors are focused on large boilers that produce steam. New advances have been made in fusion power. It is not ready yet, but could be soon given enough resources to accomplish the task. Space stations could be used that have huge solar arrays to beam power back down to Earth. There are so many options that are available. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a single option that will fill the bill for everything but combinations of technology should be tried. What are we waiting for, now is the time to move? Since this article was written the United States has become the biggest producer of oil and alternate power has increased to cars, homes and industry.
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