The city of Minneapolis runs on largely dead dinosaur derived fuels.
Granted, we have the odd Ranger pickup and maybe even a Taurus or
Caravan that can happily cruise on ethanol. Our big trucks and heavy
equipment largely run on imported dead dinosaur derived diesel fuel.
They could quickly be switched over to biodiesel, but our city has
shown no great interest in such conversion.
A bit of background is in order here. Our country uses some 5 billion
barrels of oil a year and has about 22 billion barrels of dead dinosaur
derived oil in the ground. So without imports or renewable fuels we
have about 5-6 years worth of dead dinosaur derived oil left in our
country This explains why about 60% of our oil is imported, and that
proportion continues to rise. Worldwide, there is about a trillion
barrels of dead dinosaur oil in the ground, and it's being used up at a
rate of about 25 billion barrels a year. I'll let you folks do the
numbers- we have about 40 years worth of dead dinosaur oil in the
ground. Even if we discover more (and most of the discoveries have
already been made) oil use continues to increase worldwide as more
americans buy SUVs and 3rd world countries industrialize. So it's no
surprise that the oilmen that dominate the current U.S. government have
sent our military off to procure additional supplies of dinosaur oil.
Historicly, some countries were fortunate in having a lot more
dinosaurs die in them than others. Saudi Arabia was most fortunate,
with 260 some billion barrels under their dominion, with Iraq next in
line with 110 some billion barrels. Kuwait, Iran, and United Arab
Emirates vie for 3rd through 5th place in dead dinosaur oil reserves
with around 90 billion barrels each. It is noteworthy that none of
these nations are democracies, and most of them are in fact run by
royal families. None has a stable government.
Now if everything goes according to plan in the next few weeks U.S.
troops will sweep across Iraq, be welcomed as "liberators", and we'll
have a cheap supply of dead dinosaur oil to fuel our SUVs for another
decade or so. Of course, this is the same U.S. military that fought
barefoot peasants to a draw in Vietnam, bombed a psychiatric hospital
in Grenada, and had to retreat from Mogadishu. Since then, our military
is enlisting felons while throwing out experienced soldiers simply for
being gay. Our troops will be up against the same Iraqi forces that set
loose something mysterious that has killed and disabled thousands of
veterans of our last war with Iraq.
The same Iraqi forces also set the Kuwaiti oilfields ablaze. They
stayed ablaze for a couple years and it only cost a couple hundred
billion dollars to put out the fires. Imagine what will happen when
U.S. troops overun Iraq.... meanwhile Minneapolis sits at the end of
the pipeline, depending on a continuing flow of cheap dead dinosaur
oil. We're also competing for that dead dinosaur oil with the countries
largest user of diesel fuel, the U.S. navy. As the war escalates, the
Navy and other military services will further increase their demand for
diesel fuel. In a situation not unlike our current budget problems, a
war with Iraq will cause the cities fuel costs to skyrocket out of
control. It's also not unforseeable that we may be unable to procure
dead dinosaur fuel at any price at times.
For these reasons war with Iraq is a Minneapolis issue. To assure
necessary supplies of fuel for our fire trucks, police cars, and
snowplows our city council needs to do everything in their power to
stop this war. We also need to go farther, switching over the city's
fuel supply and fleet to renewables like biodiesel and ethanol as
quickly as possible. If I were running the city, I'd feel a lot more
confident if we had E85 and biodiesel in our tanks.
from Hawthorne, where we have plenty of siding space to store tankcars
of biodiesel...
Dyna Sluyter
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