New oil find won’t meet energy needs

The Daily Sentinel recently reported that huge oil reserves in North Dakota and Montana might contain 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of oil that could be extracted with current technology.

It is touted at being the largest potential oil resource in the 48 contiguous states
.
The same article reported that the United States had an estimated 21 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The last sentence of the article stated that the U.S. uses about 7 billion barrels of oil a year.

According to my math teacher (old math, not new math), the above information translates into the fact we have only three years of proven oil supply and the “huge North Dakota-Montana reserve” would only provide the United States with a six-month supply.

Common sense tells us that the oil industry is not going to spend the billions and billions of dollars to prove and produce the North Dakota-Montana oil reserves for only a six-month supply.

Does all of this translate into $5 to $6-per-gallon gas, enriching the U.S. oil giants and OPEC nations even more?
We sure need to develop affordable alternative-energy sources.
LARRY M. HEAD
Hotchkiss

Land used for ethanol is lost to food production

Letter writer John Wells ignores the fact most of the farm land that is now growing corn for ethanol was previously growing corn and wheat suitable for human consumption. This has given cause for higher food costs across the board.

It is also now becoming clear that the process of producing ethanol is causing as much or more pollution as the petrol industry does.
MARK SMITH
Grand Junction

GOP and Democrats guilty of excess spending

I found the letter on the so-called Fair Tax in The Daily Sentinel’s April 29 issue very interesting.

In his first paragraph, the writer ridiculed as “childish” the very idea that the Republicans might spend more than the Democrats. If he referred only to tax money, as in “tax-and-spend-Democrats,” I’d have been forced to agree with that narrowed-down meaning. But I’d still have had to point to total spending and compare the “tax-and-spend-Democrats” to the “borrow-and-spend-Republicans.”

When our present Republican administration took the reins in 2001, it inherited from the Democrats the lowest national debt in recent history.

In six short years, rather than pay-as-we-go taxing, they elected borrow-and-spend financing, running a war on credit and the national debt past it’s all-time total to some $8 trillion. Is this credit-card financing at the national level?

Seems to me that even though the Republicans might claim a lower tax-and-spend title, they should also claim that for free-style spending and outstanding overall debt growth for the American taxpayer, they remain the All Time Champeens!

By the way, I have a copy of the book, Fair Tax, which is 196 pages long, with just under seven pages devoted to explaining how it works. All the rest appears to be primarily “pitch-man” hype, without much attention to such small details as defining who deals with the flood of trillions of dollars from tens of millions of sources.

One more thing, the Statistical Abstract Of The United States for 2007 indicates a GDP of some $12.4 trillion for 2005, with a total tax income of about $2.1 trillion, just under 17 percent of the GDP.
RAY LASHLEY
Grand Junction

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