Generation We

By 2016 non-boomers will represent the largest voting bloc in the country. We are ready for change...

Sister Site

The countdown to the election continues, and we can't give up the fight just yet--while the numbers are looking good, the worst thing we can do is begin taking a win for granted. Yet, beginning to look to the future is a good idea, too.

After all, we're not in this to see who wins the pageant, we're in this to change the direction of our country.

With both Obama and Senate Democrats showing commanding leads in many races, we need to be thinking about how we'll expect our representatives to engage the issues that matter after the election. The last thing I want is a far-left pendulum swing that further deepens the divide in America. Rather, one of the things that inspires me about the possibility of an Obama presidency is the possibility his candidacy presents for real dialogue about issues that matter.

I'll keep blogging here in the weeks ahead as we get ready for election day (have YOU voted yet?), but have also launched a sister site to keep the conversation going after the election, and to begin raising issues that we could stand to have a more robust conversation around.



Unlike this site, Middle Ground Matters won't be allied to any one candidate. You'll see I've added a feed to the list on the right, and hope you'll check the new site out, and keep sending me ideas for new topics to cover. While the conversations there may lean left, I'm committed to engaging many voices in hopes of getting them right.

I have really valued the conversation this site has provoked during this election, and hope you'll join me in keeping the conversation going on November 5th and after. That is when the real work of forging a more perfect union begins...

Don't you love headlines?

This one at CNN reads "Administration Rips Democrats' Bill as Waste of Time". It could just as easily have read: "Dems to GOP: Thanks But No Thanks on Drilling our Heads into the Sand".

It remains to be seen if the bill passed by the Senate, which does allow drilling 50 miles off shore if adjacent states agree and 100 miles off shore whether they do or not, and includes a repeal of some tax breaks for oil companies and incentives for renewables, will make it out of the Congress. Either way, it is a bill that leaves some Dems feeling that it is too permissive, and some Republicans feeling that it is too restrictive.

The irony though, is that the NY Times quotes Representative Nick J. Rahall II, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Natural Resources Committee, as saying “We are opening up to 400 million acres off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to drilling and expanding the availability of oil by at least 2 billion barrels, and we have done so in a balanced, reasonable and responsible manner.”

Responsible or not, 2 billion barrels, most of which won't come on line for many years to come, represents about a 3 week supply of oil. Yup. According to both Chevron and The Oxford Princeton Programme it took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil, and will take us about 30 years to use the next trillion.

Here's some quick math:

1,000,000,000,000 barrels 
___________________________ =       approx. 91,000,000 barrels/day

30 X 365 days 

At a rate of 91 Million barrels, give or take, a day, we'll burn through 2 billion barrels in just about 21 days.

Whether drilling here and drilling now makes sense if we've got it is completely beside the point. Whatever we get from those sites will take years to come on line and won't create anywhere near the impact on the demand market to significantly impact prices at the pump or elsewhere. Waste of time indeed.