An end to a week of icicle posts

Along Rain Creek on February 5th I found two great icicle clusters.
Last time you saw one of them, and now here’s the other.

 

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Global warming is global. No matter where in the world oil and gas come from, the burning of them anywhere eventually affects the climate everywhere else. And yet the current American administration either doesn’t understand that globality or understands but ignores it for ideological reasons. As the price of gasoline in the United States kept rising in 2021 and into 2022—on February 10th it averaged $3.48, about a dollar more than a year ago—the current administration repeatedly asked OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to step up production. The reasoning follows a sound economic principle: the greater the supply of a commodity, the lower its price generally gets.

But we shouldn’t have to be begging other countries to increase the supply of oil. Practically the first thing the new American administration did when it took over in January 2021 was cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline that in a few years would have increased the supply of oil coming into the United States from Canada. The administration also made it harder and more costly for oil companies to extract oil on our own federal land.

You probably aren’t aware, as I wasn’t until the other day, that throughout the 21st century the United States has continued to import oil from Russia. The quantity of Russian oil being imported has in fact now reached a record level and accounts for about 8% of all our imported oil. That’s coincidentally about the same amount as the Keystone XL pipeline would have carried once it went into operation.

It makes no sense for the United States to keep importing oil from the Middle East and Russia when we could get it from neighboring Canada and especially from our own land. As I said at the beginning, the effect on global warming is the same no matter where the oil that’s used comes from. We could have American companies and American workers profiting from our own oil, just as our country as a whole would benefit from being self-sufficient in energy.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman