Oil is at $75 a barrel and gas is closing in on $3 a gallon. Americans, who believe that they have a constitutional right to cheap gas and monster vehicles, blame the politicians. Politicians, who think that pandering is leadership, point fingers of blame, make futile gestures and propose pie-in-the-sky solutions. Even the dimmest wit must know that we are addicted to foreign oil because we burn too much of it.
We burn too much oil because we drive vehicles that are too big and too heavy and that have terrible fuel mileage. We need to replace the gas hogs with energy-efficient vehicles and we need to do it with wartime urgency and sacrifice because we are now at war over oil.
The dollars we spend to fuel our gas guzzlers financed the 9/11 attacks on us. Those petrodollars, circulated through Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, pay the bills for al-Qaida and international terrorism. Every time you fill up that Hummer, you help Iran to get down the road to having nuclear weapons.
Does anyone believe that the United States would be sunk in the quagmire that is Iraq if there were no oil there or if it did not border Saudi Arabia? How many of America's youngest and bravest have to die or be physically and psychologically maimed for life because we have an oil abuse problem, which we deny and refuse to treat? Iraq is only a preliminary skirmish in comparison to future oil wars we will fight if we do not deal with this addiction.
America urgently needs to replace its gas hogs with lighter, fuel-efficient vehicles. The market is too slow and uncertain to bring about the needed changes. To provide the incentives for change, we need graduated taxes on inefficient vehicles with the highest tax levied on the least efficient vehicles. Every penny extracted from gas hogs would be used to subsidize efficient vehicles, making them less expensive to consumers. If we don't act now, it only gets worse.
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John H. Burns
Willmar
