Socially responsible spending

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The US and Canada have enough domestic oil to completely rid our dependence on oil from the Middle East. How much of a premium would you pay to buy gas, freight, plastics, and other oil-based products that were labeled as only using domestic oil, and had the paperwork to demonstrate that they didn't come from countries supporting terrorism?

Here is socially responsible spending: spend your own money, not someone else's.

ruveyn

Having to pay extra for "home grown" sounds to me like some kind of extortion.

I'm not a protectionist, and don't much care about home grown vs imported products, including oil. We don't have enough oil that is actually accessible to meet our energy needs. If you were talking about investing in a massive and diversified alternative energy infrastructure, I would be on board, but "drill baby drill" is not my cup of tea.

Oil dependency isn't going away as long as it's subsidized by supplying a few hundred billion in military protection of foreign wells. So our massive dependency on oil should be met by paying terrorist-supporting regimes for their oil? Drill, baby, drill, but not in my back yard?

The issue isn't NIMBY, it's where the oil is cheapest. Our military misadventures aside, trying to extract shale oil is difficult and expensive. If you like $5/gallon gas, go ahead.

So is the oil extraction in the Middle East significantly different from domestic sources? Where does one find out the relative costs of extraction for all the possible sources we might draw on?

Or you know, we can actually spend money on innovations for clean, renewable energy resources we can freely use. Rather than just keep on keeping on with the oil train and spending tons of money trying to defend the remaining resources available.

But well, that actually requires something beyond the status quo - so that won't happen.

We don't have enough oil to meet our energy needs. The Middle East doesn't have enough oil to meet our energy needs. The world does not have enough oil to meet our energy needs.

Oil is a very limited resource. In fact, every source of energy is a limited resource: It will eventually run out. The question is not if, but rather when.

In Nevada, there are people working on putting in wind generators and solar generators. Dam energy is also a good source, and more sources are being worked on as I type this.

I'm not really a "green, baby, green!" kind of guy, but it's not really a good idea to use a resource as limited as oil is for very long. In the interim, we really should just focus on getting our energy from whatever we can.

I always think how absurd it is to "protect American industry". America has a lot of natural resources, but we don't have everything. In a lot of cases, it's better to rely on another nation. America trying to do absolutely everything is a bit absurd.

Forget oil for sea-based cargo transportation. Sails work at least as good now as they had for the last thousand years. For land-based transportation trains work fairly well and they do not necessarily need to be diesel engines either. Air transportation would need to remain oil based, but there are much fewer aircraft than there are cars, trucks, etc. Personally, I usually walk wherever I need to go, even up to 16 miles at a time for the current maximum that I've traveled by foot one-way. Anyhow, there are many ways to boycott the OPEC nations and be environmentally friendly while doing so.