As Russia and Ukraine battle, our crude oil imports have gotten much more expensive. But America should not have to rely on other countries for resources that we can produce ourselves. With the Keystone XL pipeline being shut down, experts were expecting the price to only slightly change. But now that getting oil is much more difficult, I think we should reactivate the pipelines.
The government doesn’t have an issue with other countries running pipelines, and turning off ours would hardly make a dent in stopping pollution. If we want to start using less oil, we should be putting our money into electric vehicles instead of just stopping America’s oil production.
The government made it seem like there would be nothing wrong with shutting down pipelines. Official documents said we would have a minimal difference of cost. Now that big imports of oil have been shut down, we are left spending more money for a resource we have in our land. And because we must spend more on oil, we can’t use our oil as we did before. We should have a say in what happens next instead of letting the prices of oil products continue to rise.
Some may say this is worth the money because it’s helping the earth. But in the big picture it’s not doing a whole lot with most of the population still pumping fumes into the air even though we are spending more for transportation. If we start producing oil in America again, we can spend the money here that we have been spending on imports of gas and start making more electric vehicles. Then we can shut down pipelines. Then the need for gas would be much more minimal.
Zachary Owens
Layton