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Grex Environment Item 23: Soaring Oil Imports Hurting US Economy
Entered by chi1taxi on Tue Oct 25 04:48:41 UTC 1994:

A recent short article in Business Week (10/3/94 Economic Trends section)
warned that soaring oil imports could seriously hurt the US economy.
Elsewhere on Environment I've stated that oil imports account for 40% of the
trade deficit.  Now it's worse.  55% of the oil we use in the US is now 
imported.  We now import 10 million BARRELS per day.  1994 energy trade 
deficit is estimated to be $65 billion, $15 billion more than last year's.
The author feels this is part of the reason for the weakness of the dollar at
present.  He says that the greater danger is that the foreign oil producers
may try to "test America's vulnerability to their pricing behavior."  I 
assume this would be after our dependance grows a little greater, but we're
so dependant on foreign oil that they could probably run the prices up now.
At the risk of repeating myself, the harm to the economy is much greater.
40-45%, whatever it is now is a huge chunk.  The trade deficit means to us as
a nation that we are going deeper and deeper in debt, spending money we don't
own.  Also, the US and Europe no longer have a monopoly on industrialiation.
We have to lower our cost of living to be competative in the world economy.
Going from 3 car families to 1 car and using public transportation would help.
Also more compact and less detatched housing, coincidentally creates the 
density more amenable to public transportation and stores within walking 
distance.

2 responses total.

#1 of 2 by scg on Tue Oct 25 04:58:42 1994:

        I realized a few days ago that I'm now probably coming close to
averaging 150 miles or driving per week, and I really can't figure out how
to cut down on that.  What's worse is that a lot of that is done with
bikes on the roof, meaningdon't get as good gas milage.  80 miles of it is
my weekly trip to Detroit, where I teach a class in a middle school, and
another 40-80 miles of that is getting out to places where it's legal to
mountain bike, since mountain biking has been banned in all the good
riding areas near Ann Arbor for "environmental reasons".

#2 of 2 by rcurl on Tue Oct 25 06:42:39 1994:

I can't predict when the energy crunch will come to the USA, but it is
inevitable. After the OPEC dust-up in 1980+, we seem to have managed
to set it up so that we are not seriously bothered by the problem -
for the time being. But the political threat still exists, and the
resource depletion threat is inevitable - eventually. Like practically
everyone else, I've pretty much put these out of my mind, and since 
there is not much pressure for energy conservation, we are living in
the proverbial fools' paradise.

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