Dear Representative Ellsworth (D-IN)…
To the Honorable Representative Ellsworth,
I appreciate your recent email newsletter informing me of your position on the current high fuel costs in the United States.
Sadly I must disagree with the proposed solutions supported by you, my representative.
Dictating to foreign countries how they will sell their own natural resources on the global market is not going to do anything but further jeopardize our position with the nations we depend upon for a large percentage of our crude.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not for cow-towing to foreign countries but I also do not want to dictate terms to countries we’ve smacked hard for attempting to do the same thing to the United States.
The way to lessen the impact of these foreign nations who hold such sway over our energy costs is to lessen our dependence on them and the global crude oil market.
No, we cannot eliminate our dependence by drilling domestically. But, we can also not eliminate our dependence by converting our food and food growing capacity to fuel.
It stands to reason that if increasing the domestic methanol output and consumption, even if it only replaces 5-10% of our usage, is sound policy then so is developing new domestic oil and natural gas sources in an environmentally friendly way. Even if it too could only account for 5-10% of our use.
As it stands it will take years to develop both of these sources, ethanol and domestic crude, and time is wasting. Large steps have already been made in the ethanol area, it is time to get the domestic oil companies moving discovering new fields in Alaska and off the continental shelf.
It is time to spur the oil companies to increase their refinery capacity. And to give them a production boost the EPA need be directed establish a single (or only a few) acceptable gasoline formulations. It is time to eliminate the gross abuse of EPA mandated formulations on a county by county basis. This alone would reduce refinery downtime and increase production.
On the point of “gouging” it is hard to tell a company what their product is worth without nationalizing them or adding yet more controls on their products. The last time I checked were were not that type of a nation and I hope it will be a few years yet before we fall off that precipice.
The answer is not punitive actions but to focus on solutions that work within the free market system. And if necessary application of existing laws on price fixing and monopolistic practices.
Sincerely….
Your PO’d constituent