From The Staff
Now is the Time for All Good Rodders to Hit the Road!
By David Marin & The CruZin' Staff
Been givin’ some thought to years gone by and days of considerable cross country cruising. Kinda fun to remember the days of “gas war” signs at most every service station most all of the time. Those were the days, 27¢ a gallon and full service too. Pull in to the Flying A and for five bucks you’d get a tank of gas, an under-the-hood going over and your tires checked too. My how times have changed.

Remember the rockin’ horses… that’s what, as kids, we used to call the oil rigs, rocking up and down, pulling crude from the ground. It seemed as though they’d go on forever, perpetual motion machines provide endless energy from endless reserves.

Then foreign oil entered the scene. Cheap foreign oil. What could be better? Use all you want and conserve our oil reserves for the future. Made sense and what now seems like overnight the rocking horses were stilled. The flow of American crude ceased as caps were put on countless oil wells. The rocking horse was put out to pasture, so to speak.

Which brings me to the burning question… Why not uncap these wells? Why not start the horses rocking again. Hey, even if we were paying the same price for “American Gas”, wouldn’t spending American dollars in America be beneficial to our economy, faltering or otherwise?

Sure, it’s been many years and I can’t say my recall is one-hundred-percent on target, but it seems to me that the logic to shutting down U.S. oil wells was to preserve our reserve so we’d have plenty when other countries began running short. My theory is that we should use, at least to some degree, now… if for no other reason than to put a cap on the price gouging.

Also consider the emerging technologies like hybrid cars, electric cars, renewable fuel like ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen. An article by Lawrence Ulrich in the May 2007 issue of Popular Science estimates that electric (battery driven) vehicles will have a 30-percent share of the car market in 2027. Makes it occur to me that maybe the foreign oil interests see these emerging technologies as “writing on the wall” and they’ll sell as much as they can for whatever the market will bear because they see a future of declining demand.

So here we are, sitting on our reserves and if you go where logic leads we’ll eventually have great oil reserves that only gearhead-types will be interested in tapping into. In other words, fossil fuel for us dinosaurs. Hey, if we live long enough we may see 27¢ gas again. Seriously, wouldn’t it make sense to dip into the American crude oil savings account and get things flowing once again? Certainly, it would cost huge amounts of money, but, American companies have been investing bizillions of dollars in foreign countries, why not invest a little here at home?

That’s all on that subject for now; Joe Egan is preparing a more detailed analysis for the next issue.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff in this issue. We really had to cram this issue so look at every page carefully… there may be a quiz.