Thursday, January 01, 2009

This is why we need energy independence

This is precicely why we need Alaska, Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Louisianna and all of those energy producing states.

We do not want this to happen to us...

Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom cut all natural gas supplies to Ukraine on Thursday morning after talks broke down over payments for past shipments and a new energy price contract for 2009.


To make matters worse, Ukraine is where Europe receives its supply of natural gas.

The festering dispute between the two uneasy neighbors raised fears that a cutoff could lead to a repetition of the January 2006 gas crisis, when a similar dispute between Russia and Ukraine briefly interrupted gas shipments to many European countries.


Russia did this same thing in 2006 which is when the price of oil and natural gas began to skyrocket. The skyrocketing prices lasted for 2 and half years.

Funny how this happened at just the same time that the price of energy was coming down to something reasonable.

Anyone thinking that this has anything to do with the Ukraine and what bills they have or have not paid are probably fooling themselves.

This was done by Russia for a very specific purpose...to drive the price of energy up.

Natural gas and oil prices have been carrying the Russian economy for several years now. As the worldwide market has plummeted when it comes to oil and natural gas, Russia's economy has gone into the tank.

Russia wants nothing more than to start driving the prices back up.

That was before the war with Georgia in August, which kicked off an exodus of foreign capital; the global financial crunch, which dried up lines of credit used by heavily leveraged Russian businessmen; and, finally, the crash of oil prices that had underwritten much of the boom.

Crude-oil futures ended the year at $43 a barrel — a long way down from their record-shattering price of $147 in July.



This is why we need energy independence as a nation. We seem to have forgotten that is this past election, because the prices were dropping.

All it takes is a minimal blip in the supply chain and we are off to the races.

I know that so many people trashed on Alaska during this last election, especially when it became known that they are attempting to build a pipeline that feeds directly into the US markets.

The events in Ukraine are exactly why we need a direct pipeline.

This is exactly what we need. A pipeline directly feeding US markets where we do not have to rely on unstable countries with unstable dictators running the country to effect us in this way.

So...

Go, Sarah, Go.

Go, Alaska, go.

Get that pipeline built.

I know the liberals and Obama have decided that it is more important to go green than to gain any type of energy independence.

But as you can see, we cannot take our eye of the ball for even a second. This type of stuff starts to happen and once that ball gets to rolling downhill, it is very difficult to stop.

It does not matter what the prices are, we need to continue to focus on our own energy independence.

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