With the
global rising prices of oil and gas, President Barack Obama understands the need
for a shift from gas-fueled cars to energy efficient ones. The president proposed his idea in his State
of the Union address in which he would create a trust fund, at $200m a year for
10 years and that would allow the US to “break this cycle of spiking gas prices
[…] and to shift our cars entirely,
our cars and trucks, off oil”. However, this might still be a farfetched dream
since for the approval of the trust would require congressional approval, which
is much divided in terms of energy issues. While Obama believes this reduce
dependency in oil would provide more independence for the US from oil-producing
countries, create jobs and keep the US as a technology leader, house
republicans argue that "For this proposal to even be plausible, oil and
gas leasing on federal land would need to increase dramatically" in order
to keep investments safe from failures of groundbreaking innovations in the
clean energy sector, such as the high-profile failure of California solar panel
maker Solyndra, which had received $527m of government money, and became a political cudgel for Republicans to
bash the White House.
That is interesting, I was just in a conversation in another class about alternate fuel energies and why when oil prices go up but we continue to buy it at the same rate. In Brazil their cars run on ethanol, but it would be so expensive to change that and get rid of the gas dependent cars.
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