Endependence is energy independence that ends dependence on polluting fuels.

Every barrel of oil we don’t consume reduces the market and political power of nations such as Saudi Arabia, no matter where that barrel would have come from. Likewise, every barrel we don’t consume helps the environment and slows global warming, and whether it is foreign or domestic oil makes no difference. Energy conservation is what’s important. Energy independence doesn’t matter. -By Roger Sant and Michael Kinsley Sunday, December 14, 2008; Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/12/AR2008121203280.html

Our sentiments exactly, energy independence doesn’t matter.  Energy Independence is politician speak for “we’re not really going to do anything about our energy challenges.”

That is why we are starting a War for Endependence, the key ingredient of which is ending dependence on polluting fuels.

Sant and Kinsley make the point quite well that the only true independence from “foreign oil” or let’s say “foreign oil from countries we don’t like” will come from reducing our oil consumption to the point where we are only using our own oil or oil from countries we do like.

So, how do we use an ever decreasing amount of oil while keeping a vibrant economy and a good standard of living.  The answer is combination of conservation and substituting renewable energy for oil and other polluting fuels.

Plot it out.  Personal, Local, State and Federal.

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Have you noticed that when you see pizza ads on T.V., the bigger the pizza, the lower the price?  You can get a lot of bad pizza for $9.95, but can you survive on lots of bad pizza?

What if you fed the family cheap bad pizza every night for dinner?  It might be good for the budget, but soon the health effects of a lousy diet would start to show.  It wouldn’t be long until everyone decided that the cheap bad pizza diet wasn’t working.

When society was choosing energy sources during the industrial revolution, cheap was good.  Oil and coal were less expensive than whale oil and wood.  But like with pizza, cost is not the best way to judge the value of an energy source.

With energy, we have lots of cheap bad fuel choices. We have coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas.  This stuff is cheap because there is so much of it (especially coal), and the energy yield of fossil fuels is very high.

Here is a good outline of how fossil fuels formed:

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

There are a couple of problems with the cheap bad fuel choices.  First of all is the fact that they are non renewable, so eventually we will run out of them (all of the pizza places will close, and there won’t be any frozen pizzas either).  Second is the fact that as with eating pizza for dinner every night, burning fossil fuels has unhealthy side effects.  They release greenhouse gases which are a cause of global warming and they release other toxins into the air.

A scientist friend of mine explained it to me this way - “it took the earth millions of years to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we are in the process of putting it all back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years”.

Here is a video about the different types of fuels we are using currently:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-6.html

What we need is a more balanced energy diet.  We can use fossil fuels sparingly.  But we need to add lots more renewable energy to our plates (think of renewable energy as fruits and vegetables).

Renewable energy sources may not be as cheap as fossil fuels, but in the long run we will be much healthier when we change our cheap bad fuel choice diet.