The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has dropped to its lowest level since 1982, Department of Energy data this week showed, revealing the continued drawdown of emergency oil as the nation weathers a global energy shortage.
The reserve shrank by more than 3 million barrels of oil over the week ending on Aug. 28, the DOE said, leaving the stockpile at 286.6 million barrels or about 40% of overall capacity.
The largest global oil supply disruption on record has catapulted U.S. gasoline prices above $4 a gallon, rekindled inflation and helped set the stage for November’s midterm elections.
The biggest positive thing I hope comes from all of this nonsense is that the world uses this as a turning point to renewables that they can control domestically or within their own communities. Everyone running their own thermal, solar, or wind would be amazing.
We might want wind /solar/batt, but once the reserves are gone and Trump can’t make any more money manipulating that part of the market, he will start taking kickbacks for selling oil leases to every scrap of public land that he can flog. The only way we are getting a pivot to solar is if someone pays him off and then supplies him with a steady stream of 14year old Russian girls to keep reminding him of how he won that deal.
No kidding. There’s so much energy out there already we don’t need to keep burning dinosaurs at the rate we do. We have the technology for it, we just need the will.