Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Shale, I Love You


I am very much effected by the raising gas prices. We are thinking twice about going places. I have stopped my weekly runs to Albany to the public library for a fun outing I'm reconsidering my weekly grocery trip....when we first moved to the country in 2008 I shopped once-a-month, but I slowly stopped doing that as time wore on, maybe due to manageable gas prices.

I try and combine my trips as much as possible. So, on Friday I made the whole family go with me to Winco, then we headed to Albany to Khol's and Target, and finally ended up at First Burger to meet up with the cousins and pick my oldest up from a weekend away.

So far I'm set for this current week and will not need to make any trips into town, town being Albany or Corvallis. However, I do have two meetings this week that will demand that I travel twice for 30 mins. each, and I find my stomach knotting a little bit due to the gas money I will need to hand over for those excursions.

I noticed at the pump the other day that everyone was paying in cash and that no one was filling up their tanks.

When we planned out our monthly budget for April, we definitely had less money to work with. Where did the money come from to cover our gas: food, entertainments, clothing, and gifts.

I was very eager to read the cover story on Time this week: Shale! And I found this closet environmentalist (that is me) saying, "Drill, baby drill!" I was also feeling very supportive of all efforts to come up with vehicles powered by electricity and other green energy sources.

I think the part I resonated the most was, in reading the cover story, that we have about 100 years worth of shale sitting under our soil that would make us no longer dependent of Middle Eastern oil...I'm starting to think this is a good place to no longer be dependent on, and that gives us a good amount of time to pursue good, solid, viable, green energy sources. We can do it! I want my next car to be a car powered by electricity. I dream of a day when I will tell my grandchildren, "Yes, we used to go to gas station to power our cars."

But, we need time to develop these resources well, and shale gives us this.

The sad side to this story of sale discovery is that some people don't like it. I get it. It changes the landscape, if it is your farm they are wanting to drill on. But there are environmental and political costs to all energy sources. I'm thinking I'd rather deal with the shale costs instead of the current costs of energy that we've been experiencing.

What about you? Do you notice the price of gas? Do you think about your driving trips?

2 comments:

Angelina said...

We have a camry hybrid and love it. Shale is a great idea. So much better than silly ethanol that costs more diesel fuel to make than it saves, and more damage to the environment.

We would love to have a diesel plug in hybrid that we could run on bio diesel/electricity for longer trips and fully electric for town etc.

Anonymous said...

You need to watch the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car". Very interesting. There use to be some Electric Cars, maybe about 15 years ago. The owners loved them, and sadly they were put out of business. =(
-Laura