Creating New Fossil Fuels

An article found HERE describes how a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota are creating their own gasoline. The team is using a special kind of bacteria to turn carbon dioxide into petroleum, using solar energy. This idea has earned this group of students a $2.2 million grant from the US Department of Energy. "Led by biochemistry professor Lawrence Wackett, the researchers are assembling a "co-culture" system in which two types of bacteria grow on opposite surfaces of a thin latex film. The bacteria on the upper surface will make glucose during photosynthesis. The glucose will then diffuse through the latex to the second bacteria, which will turn it into the building blocks of diesel and gasoline." The process looks like this:Led by biochemistry professor Lawrence Wackett, the researchers are assembling a "co-culture" system in which two types of bacteria grow on opposite surfaces of a thin latex film. The bacteria on the upper surface will make glucose during photosynthesis. The glucose will then diffuse through the latex to the second bacteria, which will turn it into the building blocks of diesel and gasoline. The group is currently working on getting a patent for their idea. It is ideas and initiatives like this that will help break our country's addiction to oil. If we can create our own clean fuel, not only will it help us reduce the prices we are paying at the pumps right now, but it will also help keep the environment clean. This process is using carbon dioxide which is the biggest problem of pollution. Carbon dioxide is the largest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere that is contributing to global warming. If we can take that carbon dioxide and turn it into fuel then we will be cleaning up the atmosphere and helping create fuel that our country needs. Steps like these are the only ones we should be taking when it comes to the development of energy in our country. We need to break away from oil and fossil fuels, and need to create alternate forms of energy that won't run out and cost us fortunes.

US Oil Dependency 101

In the article HERE, CNN gives a very basic set of bullet points to give a brief understanding of what is going on with the American dependency on oil. Although the list is short, there were a lot of surprising facts on it. One thing I had no clue about was that only Russia and Saudi Arabia pump for oil out of the ground than the US. However, even though we are the third largest oil producers in the world, we still need to import "51-60%" of our oil. And where is the one country we get the most oil from? Is it Iraq? Saudia Arabia? Libya? The answer is no. The largest quantity of foreign oil actually comes from Canada. This is surprising to me since our wars in the Middle East are supposed to be over oil, well then where is it? If we are fighting so hard for it then why is it still Canada that is giving us the most oil? That's a question I cannot answer. The top five countries that we get our oil from Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Nigeria, in that order. This article gave a great overview of the dependence on oil in the US.

Truth Behind Our Energy Crisis?

President Obama said in THIS ARTICLE that he does not believe there is an energy crisis. But because he doesn't think so, does that mean it is true? Currently the national average for gasoline is $3.84 a gallon. This morning on my way to school a gallon of gas cost $4.29. It is hard to believe that there is no energy crisis when I have to pay this much at the pump, and a year ago I was paying around $2.85 to $3 a gallon. "The president laid out his own plan for controlling prices, which focus on ending price gouging but also call for an end to the $4 billion in federal subsidies for oil and gas firms. He said there are some steps the U.S. can take to improve the situation such as ramping up domestic oil production and ending subsidies for oil and gas firms."  Obama wants to stray away from gas and move in a better direction. “Instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow’s”. I could not agree with him more. Not only would investing in greener forms of energy be cleaner for the environment, but it would also create more jobs for Americans. If we can start to gear our focus towards trying to develop alternate energy sources, we will be able to create jobs for people who want to help do this. We would need people to research and figure out how to make it work and then others to use it in things such as construction of greener buildings and work for supplying cleaner energy to our communities. The creation of these jobs would help stimulate our economy and would help pull us our country out of the recession we are in and go back to a more productive and easier way of life in America.

Countdown to the Marketplace of Ideas: 19 Days Left

My topic of discussion at the marketplace of ideas is going to be the United States of America's dependency on oil. Because of oil, our country is engaged in two wars right now, and they prioritize the foreign policy based on whether or not we can get oil from the country we engage with. As the beginning steps of my research, I have watched two different Frontline documentaries about the United States and the effect that oil has on our country. The first film I watched was 20 minutes long and was called Colombia: The Pipeline War. The film was all about how an American oil pipeline caused violence and civil war in Colombia. Rebels attack the pipeline daily. They plant bombs at certain sections and blow up chunks of pipe and run before the military gets to the scene. Every time the pipe is attacked the military has to come to survey the damage and have to repair the pipe. A lot of the time the rebels that blew up the pipe are still waiting around hidden in the fields somewhere near the damage and will attack the military as they come to check out the damage. America's addiction to oil causes problems all around the world, and the situation in Colombia is a great example. The US doesn't even think about what is going on in the places they are drilling because all they want is the oil. Instead of researching and inventing new sources of renewable energy, the government is dead set on using up all the oil in the world before it admits it has a problem.

The second film I watched was an hour long and was called The Spill. It was about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that happened last year. The film gave a history of BP and talked about not only the spill in the Gulf but also the explosion of a refinery in Texas City, Texas and the spill in Alaska's North Slope in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. What I didn't know before watching this film was the BP had a history of cutting costs to the point where safety of their workers and of the equipment was in danger. Anyone who knew this would have seen the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico coming a mile away. In Texas City, BP cut costs in their refinery and decided not to update equipment to bring them up to the standards of the rest of the oil companies around the world. The automatic safety checks like alarms and automatic shutdown were not working and that caused the oil to fill up too much in the pipes and eventually explode. The oil was spewing from the top of the stacks like a geyser. 15 people were killed and around a 170 more were injured. In Alaska, BP decided to cut costs again and made the decision to not clean out their pipes. In order to clean the pipes they use a device called a Pig to scrape out the sediment from the walls of the pipe. BP hadn't done that for about ten years and because of that the pipes were extremely corroded and eventually burst. The only reason that the spill in Prudhoe Bay was not a huge disaster was because it happened in the winter. The snow and cold was able to cause the oil to pool up instead of flow into the rivers near the pipe. If it were to have happened in the summer time, cleaning up the oil would have been very difficult and much of it would have flowed into natural water sources and would have poisoned the land around it. The explosion in the Gulf was caused by BP trying to save 7 million dollars by cutting corners and not living up to many of the safety standards the rest of the oil world uses. This was all possible because of the laws in the United States though.

If the US were to have tighter laws about safety and cleanliness of operations for oil refining then I feel that these accidents could have been avoided. Instead, the government let a lot of things slide because they wanted to benefit from the oil that was going to be produced. The addiction we have to oil as a country has made us blind to many other things going on around us. Because we care so much about finding oil, we pay less attention to safety and are left cleaning up huge messes that should have never occurred in the first place if we would have cared a little bit about how we get our oil. It is time for the United States of America to start looking into new sources of renewable energy. There will be a day when all of the oil in the world has been burnt up and we will be left in the stone age again. We need to invest in things like wind and solar energy. The sun shines on the Earth every single day. If instead of having huge oil refineries, we have solar refineries, I'm sure we could produce more, better, cleaner fuel than we have now. The only way that we can expect this to happen though would be if we are forced to by an extreme oil shortage and that does not seem like it will happen too soon.

State of the Union

This year's state of the union was interesting to watch. It seemed like Obama was trying intentionally to make the speech bipartisan. The Republicans and Democrats usually sit on opposite sides of the room from each other. They always stand and applaude at different times, when something their party likes is said. But this year it was different. The Republicans and Democrats seemed to mix this year. What I connected to most from President Obama's speech was what he talked about with the future and educatoin. Obama said, "Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of our students aren't even finishing high school." As a soon-to-be high school graduate this related right to me. Fortunately for us, we live in a nice area where many students don't drop out of high school. There are a few, but it is definately not 25% of our students. I am fortunate that I am able to complete my high school education and go on to further my education at college. Unfortunately many others are not as lucky. If students were to stay in school and at least finish high school, they would see that the education is all they need to start a good life. Then maybe they'd apply for higher learning. This country needs to do something to work on our youth's education. There has to be a reason why all these students have decided to drop out of school. We need to do something to figure out why these kids don't want to finish their education and fix it. If we start by fixing the education system then maybe we'd be able to have these newly educated young adults help generate ideas to help solve other problems this country has.

Mock Trial Response

I worked on the case of Elyse Roberts. I was arguing on the side of the District Attorney's Office of the District of Columbia. My job with the case was to prove that Ms. Roberts was not sexually harrassed. Unfortunately, we were not able to prove this. In the end the jury decided that Kevin Murphy had sexually harrassed Elyse Roberts and the District Attorney's Office of the District of Columbia did nothing to stop it. At first I did not believe this was the right the choice. I did not think that Elyse Roberts had been sexually harrassed. However, after discussing the verdict a little bit in class I saw that I was wrong. I was looking at it all from the viewpoint of an eighteen year old, male, high school senior. The things that Kevin Murphy had done or said to Elyse Roberts just seemed funny to me, because he was acting like he was my age. If it were me, I wouldn't have thought of it as such a big deal, but now that I look at it from the point of view of a mature business person I can see how wrong Kevin Murphy was. Even though I still feel like Elyse Roberts was overreacting a little bit, it is clear that what Kevin had said was wrong and in the eyes of Elyse, it made her working in environment feel hostile and unworkable. Based on that alone it is fair to say that she was sexually harrassed.
Sexual Harrassment is a very tricky thing to describe. There is no clear defination of what is and what is not sexual harrassment. There are only a few guidelines of what it is and whether or not the woman is offended even if the man did not mean to offend her. Sexual harrassment, I feel is not a big deal at DHS. I think that in high school sexual harrassment isn't as prominent because for the most part, there are boys who are too afraid to do anything to mess with a girl because they are afraid of what it will do to their reputation. The problem of date rape, like in the second case, might be a little more of an issue. I haven't heard of any cases in our school where that has happened, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about it at a high school. Boys think that because they are dating a girl for a while that means that he is entitiled to have sex with them or sometimes he will pressure the girl into having sex with him. He might not think it was rape, but if she didn't want to have sex with him, then she can call it rape at any time.

Libyan Uprising

After a few weeks of headlines, I finally dove into what is actually going on in North Africa. I originally came across some headlines on Google News about something going on in Tunisia but didn't think it was a big deal so I didn't think much of it. Then came the protests in Egypt. Those caught my attention because of how close Egypt is to Israel. Everything seemed relatively peaceful there though so I didn't read into them too much, but kept track of what the headlines said until Mubarak stepped down. Now my AOL.com homepage is plastered with headlines about Libya and the violence going on in there. After gettin' some background and a timeline of what's gone down in Libya, I feel I have a bit of an understanding. The thing that draws me into more details about Libya than Egypt is that the government in Libya is fighting back and killing the protesters. In Egypt this was not happening. Right now the United States and the European Union have put sanctions on Libya in an effort to keep the violence from continuing. This didn't happen until two days ago. Now it's time to see how long it will take for the unrest to stop or to see if we need to get involved. Since this all started in Libya gas prices here have sky rocketed. If they keep goin' up like they have been, I wouldn't be surprised if the United States got involved to settle things down. The Navy is already stationing warships in the area just in case we need to go in for any reason. I never thought that uprising like this could happen in that area of the world since it is generally very Islamic and they are led by the laws of Allah and don't seem to change. However, of the past month the whole area seems to be in unrest. I would understand if this had happened when we originally invaded Iraq, but now that there are no more combat troops there, it is interesting to see that the area erupts. I am just nervous to see how this all turns out because I don't need gas to cost anymore than it already does and I would hate for the uprest to spill into Israel and destroy everything we have there.