The US has not had a rational energy policy for many years. Instead we created energy legislation focused on conservation and citing energy independence as the principle cause. Some legislation focused on protecting the environment primarily by creating moratoria over designated geographic areas. This effectively blocked drilling along the entire eastern and western offshore areas, areas on land and offshore northern Alaska, parts of the Gulf of Mexico and vast areas of federally owned land. As the country’s oil requirement grew so too did our need to import oil. Oil prices also grew and the daily value of imports have now reached about a billion dollars per day.
Today our country is in deep recession so we need to look at our energy needs with a different set of objectives. These include energy independence, security, economic impacts, environmental factors and, of course, elimination of the daily expenditure for foreign oil. We do so in this book as we explore the two most significant ways in which energy is consumed: transportation and generation and distribution of electric power. The approach sticks to technical issues and the costs, and financial factors because in our current economic environment money has to be given priority over political issues. Focusing on increasing domestic energy production and economic issues will improve and strengthen our country. Energy independence and security will follow. In the long run the environment will be clean. In our plan, we propose a set of policies that comply with the full scope of objectives. We solicit readers to contact political leaders to create and pass the necessary legislation.
