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Did anybody see the movie Oil Storm that debuted on FX earlier this year? This movie was a fictional documentary that starts on Labor Day weekend 2005, after a category 4 hurricane wiped out the Gulf Coast, knocking out our main oil pipeline and halting oil imports into the US. The domino effect was a massive spike in gas and heating oil prices. That led to increased costs in trucking. That in turn led to exorbitant food bills, farming costs, etc. Within the year we enter a full on depression as a result of the hurricane. Saudi Arabia falls to a fundamentalist movement much like Iran did during the last oil crisis as a result of the Saudi family's pledge to get oil to the US on the cheap. The main Saudi pumping station is taken out by a terrorist-launched RPG, and we have to commit more troops to Saudi Arabia to secure the country while we're still fighting insurgents in Iraq. Back home, Farm Aid is cut. The lack of oil means machines cannot harvest and fertilizers cannot be produced. Heating oil supplies can't make it to the northeast in time for the winter and people are left freezing to death (literally) in their own homes during a massive cold snap in Boston. Russia agrees to supply us with oil, but then China underbids us and the tankers turn to another shore (this is another crisis we're facing in real-life if you've been reading the headlines for the past few weeks).
This film was spooky enough when it ran a few months back. But it was all I could think of all this past weekend. And now in the aftermath of Katrina, it is shaping up to be a true story.
Here's where I'm going to get on a political soapbox in the hopes of motivating you to think and act politically. If the Bush administration even looks at this movie, I fear they will dismiss it, in hopes of painting a rosy picture of the state of events, and so they don't have to admit how the administration's energy policies have failed to prepare ourselves for an oil crisis that is now about to smack us upside our gas-guzzling behinds. Detroit is still producing Hummers and Expeditions in spite of more fuel-efficient designs (even for our SUVs). We have not gotten serious about mass-producing alternate energy sources. We put a man on the moon in less than a decade, but we can't seem to mass produce a vehicle that is big and efficient at the same time.
Then I realized a very important point. Bush & Cheney have their private holdings very much tied up in oil and energy. When the price of crude goes up, so does their net worth ... measured in billions. There is a conflict of interest going on in the White House that is being ignored as the cost of energy gets dumped on the backs of the citizenry.
We need to discuss this issue, and PLEASE don't decend into name calling because you don't agree with my (or the opposition's) politics. This is a very real, very serious crisis unfolding before our very eyes.
