If offshore drilling were utilized to its fullest extent, the total income would increase by $5 billion a month, or 10% off of the trade deficit9. It is a commodity that the US must to invest in.
In a time where nonrenewable energy resources are being imported at $460 billion a year, alternative sources of energy are being experimented to take the place of petroleum products7. Geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen and biofuels are used to power automobiles and give electricity to housing communities around the nation8. However, as eco-friendly as alternative energy sounds, it is purely inefficient, and ultimately, detrimental to our environment. The mounting efforts to search for alternative energy sources are a waste of energy. Only 9% of the total energy used in the U.S. in 2012 was considered renewable, an amount that is not nearly enough to sustain 313.9 million Americans9. The recent investment in ethanol is merely a waste of effort. Ethanol contains carbon that was absorbed from the earth while the corn was growing, and as the carbons are entering the corn, it is leaving the topsoil10. The machinery used to pick up these corn stalks are emitting hydrocarbons 400 times greater than the amount of carbons that are being extracted11. If this type of effort were reached in order to find an alternative energy source, we would be defeating the purpose of obtaining clean air. Even if all of the US farmland were used to supply this amount of ethanol, it would only replace 1/5th of the total oil consumption12. It is, therefore, rendered inefficient to harvest a sustainable source of energy from the ground.
If scientists truly believed that alternative energy sources would be able to sustain our usage, the investments already made would have a substantial impact. Nuclear energy plants already account for 20% of our total energy costs, and the majority is due to cost of maintenance13. In less than a decade, the price of building and sustaining a nuclear plant has soared to over four times it originally cost14.
