Marco Rubio has argued the US is in a “very fortunate” position as fuel prices continue to climb nationwide amid disruption sparked by the US-Israel war on Iran.
With average US fuel prices now approaching $4.50 a gallon – their highest level in four years – the US secretary of state was asked on Tuesday how long Americans should accept them at such levels.
Other countries were suffering “big time”, Rubio replied. The US was “very fortunate” as a net exporter of oil, which is not as reliant as other countries on oil from the Middle East, he said.
If this disaster has taught us anything it’s that we can’t continue to be so utterly dependent on oil. This particular oil crisis was unnecessary, a result of profoundly incompetent leadership, but it really just accelerated the inevitable.
Oil is a finite natural resource. There’s only so much of it in the ground, and it can’t be renewed on human time scales. What we pump up and burn is essentially gone forever. We’ve already used a lot of what took nature millions of years to create. We’ve already pumped up and burned the easiest and cheapest to get at oil. There’s no more Jed Clampett oil. You know, oil that’s so near the surface and easy to extract that you can find it by accident. No, that’s all gone. We have to really look hard to find more oil, today. New oil discovery is much more expensive.
There are still about 1.77 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves. But, we use 37 billion barrels of oil every year. At that rate of consumption, proven oil reserves will be depleted in a little under 50 years. And that’s at current annual consumption levels. If our annual consumption increases, the time remaining to total depletion of proven oil reserves decreases.
We will all but certainly discover more oil than what is already proven. However, that oil will almost certainly be more expensive to extract. Again, we’ve pumped up and burned all the Jed Clampett, sweet bubbling crude. Today, we have to drill deeper to get to less easy to extract oil, like oil that’s locked up in porous rock that has to be fractured apart.
So it takes more money to produce a barrel of oil than used to, and the demand for oil just keeps going up every year. Higher oil prices are an inevitability. It’s simple supply and demand. We simply can’t afford to continue to be so dependent on oil. We have to diversify.
Electrified transportation is a great option, especially if the electricity is generated from renewable sources. Once we’ve burned a gallon of gas, it’s just gone. It’s been used and it’s never coming back. Conversely, the sunlight that was used today to generate electricity will be replaced with new sunlight tomorrow. The sun keeps making more, and it will keep making more for billions of years.
This isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s a financial issue, it’s a common sense issue.
What the usa and it’s puppets should learn is stop trying to ruin other countries