Regular gas was priced at $5.759 a gallon last week at a Shell station in Goleta. The average price in Santa Barbara County Friday was $5.95 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association.
Henry Schulte
It’s ironic. I’m reading a thriller novel right now, written a couple years ago, where the U.S. president was faced, in some respects with a similar crisis we are facing today. Mexican cartels blow up a refinery in Houston, and it immediately causes the price of oil to rise to $127 a barrel. Stock market plunges and the price of gas hits $6 a gallon. The author was almost psychic.
The difference with the fictional female president and the one we have now is, in the novel she’s a leader.
She signs an executive order to put a temporary freeze on all environmental regulations related to oil exploration, production drilling and refining. She removes all restrictions on drilling in federal land. And she opens the door for new oil and gas refineries. She also applies it to coal and natural gas and fires up the Keystone pipeline again. She’s determined to make America energy-independent before her first term is up.
And within hours of her address, the stock market soars.
Her plan would also stop the funding of global terrorism and prevent shoving cash at people like Vladimir Putin so he can murder at will. (For all of you who care about Ukraine, this is how you go about it.) In return America would become the world’s largest oil exporter and would create thousands of high-skilled jobs. Instead of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Worse program, we’ll have a Drill Back Better policy making us powerful again and strengthening our national security instead of undermining it.
Oil haters reading this are having a conniption fit. This will make “climate change” even worse! It would be their ultimate nightmare.
So, tell me this. We’re willing (have to) to bring in oil from the Middle East or Venezuela, all corrupt countries, and pay extra to ship over here because we want to do our part to fight climate change? That of course makes zero sense. What difference does it make if the oil is drilled and loaded somewhere else in the world? Does that mean it will have no effect on climate change? If you believe in climate change and oil is the evil culprit and if you believe that just because you can’t see it being drilled in Venezuela makes it all better, you’re just deceiving yourself.
At least in the States, we have control on how it’s produced. In corrupt nations, they can do as they please and pollute the air. Isn’t that defeating the entire point?
If we have full control of our own production, we also have full control on how it’s extracted as opposed to relying on some foreign land. We get all the profit, much cheaper cost for Americans and it just makes us great again.
This shouldn’t be disputable. We have more than enough energy resources to take care of ourselves and surplus to sell elsewhere. We’ve already proven it. Time to do it again.
And it’s time we finish the wall. No more messing around. We need to button this country up. We can regain our energy independence and control our border. Maybe even start making our own fertilizers and antibiotics. Pull completely away from relying on the likes of China. Which by the way, owns 200,000 acres of American farm lands. That fact alone should cause shivers to ripple across our country.
So when you get up in the morning and you fire up the plastic coffee pot and sip that kick starter, remember it was made with petroleum products. When you get into your electric car, all the plastic that makes it look cool, was not created by wind machines. And the electricity required to charge the batteries is produced by coal and gas and the tires that make it go round and round weren’t made by solar panels
The day will come following the natural order of things when oil will eventually run out. Prior to that, more scientific headway will have been made offering even better solutions to provide man with its energy needs. But right now, the human race has been blessed with black gold to make our lives comfortable, safe and enjoyable. Don’t fight it. Enjoy it.
Think about Ukraine. Cities that have been destroyed who lost their energy source have resulted in even more deaths because of it. Windmills and solar panels wouldn’t have done a thing for them.
Gas prices will hopefully come back down, but the crisis won’t go away unless we’re proactive. We’re always leading from behind. We become so complacent. Sadly, too many people still think they can rely on the government to take care of them. If we allow this socialist mentality to dominate our decisions, we’ll forever be at the mercy of foreign countries who hate us.
That is not who we used to be. Let it not be who we become.
Henry Schulte welcomes questions or comments at hschulteopinions@gmail.com.
