Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
duction of vehicle fuel-economy standards and a lower national speed-
limit in the 1970s to the development of ethanol road fuel and renewable
electricity in the 2000s.
The fact that these measures have not prevented the ratio of US oil
imports to home-grown energy production from rising is not evidence of
total failure: without these measures, the oil-import ratio might have gone
higher still. But actual energy independence for the US is a mirage, a goal
unlikely ever to be reached.
Drill, baby, drill!
This was a slogan that emerged, on the Republican side, in the 2008 US
presidential election, as a call for restrictions on domestic drilling to
be eased. For the US is probably the only country in the world to have
put certain of its hydrocarbon reserves off-limits to commercial drill-
ers. Alaska has two areas off-limits to drillers. The National Petroleum
Drill baby drill? Caribou graze in the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge: a
conservation area off-limits to oil and gas exploration.
