Oil Embargo

There is a bounty of tension between what should be done about energy, namely nonrenewable energy such as gasoline and coal. Americans are in the deepest rut of this problem as a result of heavily relying on middle eastern countries for oil. This excerpt from Tom Friedman's book Hot, Flat, and Crowded beautifully depicts how far behind America is from being an energy independent country:

I can think of no better example of America's lack of sustained focus to take on a big challenge than the way we have dealt with our energy crises. In the wake of the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, the Europeans and Japanese responded by raising gasoline taxes and, in Japan's case particularly, by launching a huge drive towards energy efficiency. France invested especially heavily in nuclear energy as a state project, with the result that today France gets 78 percent of its energy from nuclear plants and much of the waste is reprocessed and turned into energy again. Even Brazil, a developing country, launched a national program to produce ethanol from sugarcane to make itself less dependent on imported oil. Today, between Brazil's domestic oil production and its ethanol industry, it doesn't need to import crude oil.

New York Times produced this article:

An explosion on April 20, 2010 aboard the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig working one mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, led to the accidental release of nearly five million barrels of oil, the world's largest spill by far. BP, the rig's operator, failed repeatedly to plug the leak but the catastrophe did not lead to widespread efforts to reduce oil use.
It did, however, lead to a wave of new regulation and legislation that promises to fundamentally remake an industry that has operated hand-in-glove with its government overseers for decades.  Some in the the industry feared that the BP accident would be a turning point for oil exploration the way the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in 1979 contributed to a virtual 30-year moratorium on nuclear plant construction.

From these two articles it is easy to see how far behind we are in the world when it comes to independence from oil and abundance of clean energy. The recent BP oil spill is similar to the Three Mile Island incident thirty years ago. The nuclear accident caused anti-nuclear energy sentiment causing a ban on construction. Looking back, however, the idea of stopping the production of clean energy sounds, well, dumb. The relationship between the BP spill and the Three Mile Island breakdown could show some positive movement in the future. The best outcome would be to reduce our usage of oil and to start catching up to countries such as France and Brazil. Both countries' energy standards are something to look up to.