Passionate

There is no doubt that Barack Obama spoke very passionately at the DNC last night. I was very impressed at his delivery but some of the content of the speech left me worried. The biggest concern I have is about his pledge to free us from "Middle Eastern oil" in just 10 years. Most of the pundits are using the term "foreign oil" which isn't what he said and there is a BIG difference.

We get a lot of oil from the Middle East but we already import more from Canada than any other single country. Sure Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait combine to provide more oil than we get from the Canadians but those are our only "Middle Eastern" oil sources and represents about 21% of our total imported oil. Increasing average fuel economy of the cars on our roads by just 25% would be nearly enough to meet Obama's promise. Got to love his mastery of semantics but expect him to get pounded for the whole foreign oil vs. "middle east oil".

My first thought was the only way we're going to achieve that is by going electric. We're going to have to replace a significant amount of cars on the road with hybrids and pure electrics. But with all those electric cars will come a need to power them which means more power plants. He covered the gamut in his speech; mentioning solar, wind, clean coal, domestic natural gas and the dreaded nuclear. It's the mention of nuclear that really interested me because I've always thought that we should recommit ourselves to Nuclear power... We'll see which the Greenies think is the lesser evil, air polluting cars or planet killing nuclear power plants