Fuel For Thought

Me son Charlie and I were at the Upper Peninsula State Fair last Friday. We stayed long enough to hear the free rock concert that night, featuring Saliva and Fuel, two hard rock bands from about twenty five years ago who are still active.

I honestly enjoyed it. I will be the old man and say that Saliva's songs all kind of sounded the same to my ear. Hard rock and metal, while I like them well enough, both seem to hit me that way. You kids get off my lawn! 

But Fuel, who I had never heard of before last week, I liked quite a bit. They have their own distinct sound, at least in my mind. It helped that their various songs each sounded different, or different enough that I could tell them apart. I won't bore you with a set list (mostly because I have no idea of the song names) but during their encore they did a great hard rock cover of Hotel California. It was really, really good.

I might actually buy a couple of their albums. You know, be the old man in the alt rock section of the record store (vinyl is making a comeback you know) who gets made fun of behind his back by the half goth teen employees who take his money just the same.

A Conservation Plan for Everyone!

The Detroit Free Press this morning editorialized on the bad things about gasoline falling back to around two bucks a gallon. Among other things, the paper lamented that it would make people less inclined to conserve natural resources.

Fuel conservation, outside of genuine need (and I mean need on the scale of World War II nationally, or harsh personal finance individually) is really a rather pessimistic principle. You conserve because you have no option (personally), or because you have no hope in the future or see that great or unusual restraint is necessary (nationally). While we each have to deal with our own situations the best we can based on our personal resources, as a nation we can do more. We can tie into the traditional American belief in herself, that someone or something given the opportunity will find us alternatives when the time comes. We can believe that with the freedom we have come to rely on we will find new fuel sources for our cars, homes, and businesses. We can see that if the government would just get out of our way we will get over any over-reliance on limited means. Something will be developed or found or invented to alleviate the current pressures on our current natural resources.

Or do we think that once the oil is gone, we're toast? That's what the liberal 'government is the answer' thinkers apparently believe.

That is patently absurd, unless we allow it to become the case. So we do need certain pressure to keep it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. And the surest pressure to prevent that is exactly what may seem, at a glance, the lousiest choice.

Drill that oil. Process it. Burn it up in our cars. Because if you want something to take the place of oil, then get rid of the oil. Where there's a buck to be made and a need to be filled, someone will satisfactorily address the situation if given the freedom to do it.

So pump that oil out of the ground and into your tank. As P. J. O'Rourke said in one of his books: "Fat lot of good its done lying in the ground for billions of years."