Thesis paper
The research recently conducted by the team from cheap custom essay writing services revealed, that U.S. is the largest consumer of oil in the world, burning through 18.83 million barrels per day. Even if the U.S. produced all petroleum products domestically, Americans would still feel the shocks from market volatility. Oil is a global market, and market prices prevail regardless of origin. Despite policies to improve vehicle efficiency, America remains dependent on oil. This dependency presents several threats to U.S. national security.
In other research conducted for mba essay state that America’s oil dependence saps the U.S. economy because consumers lack fuel options. To that end, investments in alternative sources of fuel – biofuels, natural gas, electric vehicles – can act as a hedge against oil price volatility. Throughout 2012, the U.S. spent $4.36 billion on energy research, which fell well below IEA recommendations. Due to budget caps and sequestration, energy research funding will drop substantially over the next few years.Within the confines of other custom essay oil dependency is a long-term threat. The rising cost of oil dependence affects all aspects of American society and threatens national security. If the U.S. wishes to reduce these threats in the future, the U.S. must properly fund energy research and development to commercialize technologies that will break America’s oil dependency. Only then can we say we have actually achieved energy security.
In recent years, oil dependency and the automobile’s future have become hot button topics in the United States. Gal Luft has argued that oil dependency is an issue which connects deeply with national security, noting that the United States’ relationship with the oil-producing Muslim states is tenuous at best. Luft, as well as the Financial Times’ Philip Gordon, conclude that continued oil imports impose are therefore a political liability. Recently, Thomas Friedman beamed positively at the strides that Denmark has made in asserting its energy independence and weaning itself of oil. He observes that this is due to the wisdom of responding to the 1973 oil crisis with self-imposed limits upon oil rather than prolonging the energy status quo. Such a path should be the template for resolving the oil crisis: an ideological reframing that encompasses the political will to reinvent existing systems, the motivation to innovate and the impetus to develop solutions.
Proposals for remedying oil dependency have frequently centered upon fuel alternatives such as ethanol and other biofuels. For example, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has affirmed much faith in ethanol, noting that it is a crucial step in “kicking our oil addiction.” However, environmentally-inclined critics have observed that ethanol is not a perfect solution to fuel dependency. Richard Manning (88-89) notes that corn-based industrial agriculture, with its detrimental effects on soil fertility, is largely unsustainable, and Mindy Lubber affirms this view by noting that the rapid expansion of corn production spawned by an ethanol boom could potentially recreate the conditions of The Great Dust Bowl, which saw a massive grain rush parch a landscape that had taken decades to go from arid to fertile. Patrick Mazza reports that recent studies have expressed concerns regarding the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from land use changes directed towards corn production. Such criticism encourages us to disavow an uncritical embrace of ethanol in search of creative energy solutions, for the capacity to innovate should not be disregarded in favor of flawed ‘silver bullet’ solutions.
Building compact communities, as Alex Steffen argues, helps address many of the problems inherent to oil dependence. Steffen’s contention is that while alternative forms of propulsion are all well and good, the answer to sustainability lies not beneath the hood of an automobile, but in rethinking how we design cities. Regardless of what progress can be made in the field of automotive technology, it is undercut by the massive increases in automobile ownership and driving distance. Steffen argues that the best automobile innovation is not an improvement to its underlying technology, but eliminating “the need to drive it everywhere we go,” and this argument easily extends to oil dependence and oil consumption.
The Brazilian city of Curitiba has, in recent years, come to best exemplify this notion. McLaren and Goodman, et. al. note that the city has grown to become a sustainable metropolis where bike paths and bus systems account for much of its transportation demands. From the seventies onwards, Curitiba made public transportation an integral part of the urban planning scheme and the result as McLaren notes is that, “[people] still have their cars but use 30% less petrol than 8 comparable Brazilian cities.” The reason behind Curitiba’s success is not capital or technology, but the momentum for change, articulated best by Lerner who says that projects come to fruition largely “when there is political will, a common vision and most importantly when a shared responsibility equation is organized.” The inability to muster political will and collective momentum is what abnegates the capacity to address the oil crisis and resolve the issue of the automobile’s future, and it is a malaise which exists on multiple fronts.
Knauf, et. al, (4) have noted that the history of bio-energy development has been marred by its inextricable connection with waxing and waning concerns over energy security. As such, research and development of such oil alternatives have been subject to sharp swings that match the fluctuating price of oil. This is because bio energy and other oil alternatives have been viewed largely as supplements to the current oil-based fuel hegemony. Juan Enriquez opines that the best way to address this is to stabilize oil prices. A stable oil price guarantees that the energy market will not be so tumultuous as to make it impossible to develop market-feasible bio energy. A stable oil price politically wills into being a realistic goal for energy research: to develop new energy sources at a cost below the price of oil.
Another proposal which addresses broad demographic support and political pragmatism is a federal speed limit. Federal speed limits are not without precedent: Former U.S. President Richard Nixon imposed a 55 mph speed limit in response to the 1974 oil crisis. A study from the National Academy of Sciences noted that the energy savings resulting from the law amounted to about 167,000 barrels of petroleum per day, representing $2 billion dollars annually. However, Gifford Pinchot proposes a speed limit based on fuel economy rather than raw speed. Pinchot notes that automotive reforms require broad support, even from those who like to drive fast for the fun of it. “Taking away their fun without replacing it […] won’t win their support for the necessary climate policies,” he opines, but by giving automobile manufacturers the incentive to increase fuel efficiency, “fuel efficiency would become part of the meaning of fast.”
While there is no denying the imperativeness of the oil crisis, the necessity of acting with haste should not come at the expense of developing solutions that are effective. The haste to retrofit ethanol into the automotive machine is flawed, and fails to address the complexity of our automotive lifestyle. However, this should not dishearten us from re-engineering cities, fostering technological innovation and crafting effective and innovative policy and it is possible not with “silver bullets” but with recognizing our mutual responsibility to be creative and motivated.
Works Cited:
Parmley, Julia. “U.S. must end dependency on oil, expert says.” UDaily. 6 April 2006. University of Delaware.
Gordon, Philip. “An Improbable Cure for Oil Addiction.” The Financial Times. 12 May 2006.
Friedman, Thomas. “Flush with Energy.” The New York Times. 9 August 2008.
Khosla, Vinod. “My Big Biofuels Bet.” Wired Magazine, 14.10, October 2006.
Manning, Richard. Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press, 2004.
Lubber, Mindy. “Corn Ethanol and The Great Dust Bowl.” Worldchanging. 8 November 2007. Retrieved August 11, 2008 from: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//007637.html
Mazza, Patrick. “Growing Sustainable Biofuels: Common Sense on Biofuels.” Worldchanging. 3 March 2008. Retrieved August 11, 2008 from: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//007868.html
Steffen, Alex. “My Other Car is a Bright Green City.” Worldchanging. 23 January 2008. Retrieved August 12, 2008 from: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//007800.html
Goodman, Joseph; Laube, Melissa and Judith Schwenk. “Curitiba’s Bus System is Model for Rapid Transit.” Urban Habitat. Winter 2005-2006. Retrieved August 12, 2008 from: http://www.urbanhabitat.org/files/25.Curitiba.pdf
McLaren, Warren. “Curitiba: City with a Soul.” TreeHugger. 23 June 2005. Retrieved August 12, 2008 from: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/curitiba_city_w.php
Forum Barcelona 2004. “Jaime Lerner (Architect): ‘The city is not a problem, rather it contains a solution for everything.” 9 September 2004. Retrieved August 12, 2008 from: http://www.barcelona2004.org/eng/actualidad/noticias/html/f045958.htm
Knauf, Gerald & Nikki Skuce, Jurgen Maier, Annie Sugrue. “The Challenge of Sustainable Bioenergy: Balancing climate protection, biodiversity and development policy.” Retrieved August 12, 2008: http://www.cures-network.org/docs/discussionpaper_bioenergy2007.pdf
Enriquez, Juan. “Juan Enriquez wants to grow energy.” TED Conference. New York, NY. September 2007. Retrieved August 12, 2008 from: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_wants_to_grow_energy.html
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