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I know you are being hit hard by sky-high gasoline and diesel prices. However, this current crisis should not have come as a surprise. U.S. oil production has steadily declined since 1970, when it was nearly 10 million barrels per day, to 5.1 million in 2007. With the United States now consuming 20.7 million barrels per day, and Congress remaining stagnant – unable to craft the sort of comprehensive energy strategy I have been calling for since 2000 that could lead our country into a future free of an oil-based economy – we have been forced to seek energy abroad. As we continue to become more and more reliant on foreign sources of oil, we are shipping our wealth overseas to countries that do not necessarily have America's best interests at heart. Congress has sat on its hands for far too long and now I need your help. I'd like to share your stories about the impact high gas prices are having on your lives so that my colleagues in the Senate can better understand how real people in Ohio are coping with these escalating costs. Ohio families cannot ignore rising gasoline prices, and your stories could help convince Washington lawmakers to stop ignoring this crisis. We need to adopt policies that find more domestic sources of energy, including alternatives, and supporting technologies that help us conserve more and use less. Rather than begging Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria for more oil, we need to take advantage of America's natural resources and adopt policies that will lead to increased development of energy at home while at the same time jumpstart the technologies that will help us conserve. The United States should find more and use less: - Undertake an Apollo-like project focused on clean, reliable and domestically abundant energy alternatives. Our nation has the technical knowhow and expertise to create new alternatives to oil such as fuel cells and biofuels, while enhancing our traditional resources with advanced technologies;
- Open up the Outer Continental Shelf to safe exploration. Doing so could increase our production capacity by 40 percent;
- Allow exploration of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) which could increase our domestic oil reserves by more than 10 billion barrels of oil;
- Utilize the vast U.S. and Canadian reserves of tar sands and oil shale, as well as coal that can be converted to synthetic fuel and used in place of conventional petroleum. In fact, the United States has more oil shale than Saudi Arabia has proven oil reserves, and we have the largest coal reserves in the world;
- Conserve what we already have. If every American took commonsense steps to conserve gasoline such as properly aligning and inflating tires, the country as a whole could lower its fuel consumption by nearly a million barrels a day.
If you'd be willing to share your story, please take a few minutes to send me an e-mail at gasprices@voinovich.senate.gov about how your family is affected by these high gas prices. Please include your name, address and a phone number where my office can reach you if I have any questions. My staff and I will keep your contact information private, but I would like to share some of these stories with my colleagues in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Also, I recently appeared on The Bob Frantz Show on WTAM Radio in Cleveland to discuss this pressing issue. Please CLICK HERE if you'd like to hear the interview. Congress should not be sitting on the sidelines while Ohioans are paying the price at the pump. I hope that, by working together, we can spur some real action on this issue. Thank you for your help. Sincerely, George V. Voinovich United States Senator P.S.: I know many of you signed up to only receive my E-Newsletter. Rest assured, you will not be receiving anything more from me than the newsletter on a regular basis. But I need your help on this to make our efforts successful. | |
