Stop Crying About Welfare

My generation believes pretty strongly in the legalization, or at least decriminalization of drugs, most notably marijuana. And, much to the disappointment of old people across the country, we also tend to vote democrat (the small percentage of us that actually vote). Despite these stereotypes, I have a number of friends in favor of drug-testing welfare recipients, which in humanitarian terms is a "douche move."

Yes, the same people who will favor legalization with logic like "it's your body, do what you want with it," are in favor of revoking those same rights for people who receive welfare. They'll use reasoning like "I get drug tested to earn my money, so should they," and "if they can afford drugs they don't really need welfare," as they sort themselves into the group that has "earned their rights." Nevermind that many welfare recipients also work but do not earn enough to provide for themselves or their family, or that many are unable to work (note: unable not unwilling). Nevermind that these laws were put in place without a shred of evidence or information to justify their necessity and that since then statistics have shown that welfare recipients actually use drugs at a lower rate than the general population and therefore continuing to drug-test them actually costs the state more than it saves. Nevermind that you have an option of where to work if you don't like the policies at any one particular workplace, and people who are unable to work but still need to eat don't have those same options. And of course, nevermind the fact that for the majority of jobs, recreational drug use is as meaningless as gender or ethnicity when it comes to actually getting the job done. 

Oh, I'm sorry. You don't like your tax money going towards providing welfare for people who might be on drugs? Well I don't like mine going towards funding unnecessary wars, or bailing out companies which maliciously screwed the American people out of their homes for a little extra money which they promptly lost, or that religious institutions are exempt from paying taxes despite the fact that they provide next to nothing to the community and are often breeding pits for hate and social unrest. No one likes paying taxes, and no one likes the idea that their taxes are being used for something they don't agree with. What you can do about it is go to some country where you can use your money to hire armed guards around your property so the poor starving people don't come around asking for handouts. What you can't do is decide who gets to eat. You can't chose who "deserves" it while you stuff your face and do whatever drugs you want. And you can't decide to subjugate an entire class of people simply because of your misconceptions about them.

Drill, Faster, Drill!

One of my facebook ads right now is "Gas Prices Are Too Damn High," an organization dedicated to domestic drilling in order to reduce American dependency on foreign oil (and almost certainly to increase profits for American oil companies since someone is paying for the facebook ads) another is for buying a Prius, which is such a contradiction that I can't even get into it right now. What I do want to get into is the false dichotomy of gas prices and American drilling. Oil companies (and shady organizations like this who don't openly say who's funding them) want you to think that the solution to high American gas prices is to lower foreign dependency on oil. Your options, as they tell you, are to ravage our own territory by drilling everywhere there could potentially be oil, or continue to let gas prices rise. In reality though, no matter how much American oil we find, gas prices will ultimately rise since gasoline has to be refined from fossil fuels which take thousands of years to create in the first place. Since our rate of oil consumption is far greater than that of oil creation, more drilling can only hope to postpone the inevitability of our completely depleting supplies of fossil fuels.

While I'm a firm believer in delaying inevitable problems for as long as possible, the pragmatist in me just looks for ways in which these problems can be avoided entirely. In this situation the answer is pretty obvious: what if we didn't have to depend on fossil fuels, whether domestic or foreign? Wouldn't it be great if we could utilize some sort of renewable source of energy rather than draining one which is so outrageously slow to replenish? Wouldn't it be ironic if the very winds we build shelters against could power the heating systems used inside those walls? Wouldn't it be amazing if we could somehow store the energy produced by the sun so that we could use it in the most overwhelming darkness? We are able to do these things, and with little to no detriment to the environments we live in. In fact, the only people negatively impacted by the decreased use and supply of fossil fuels are those who profit from them.

If you were to walk in to any building which meets American structural standards, would you be able to identify their power source without inspection of their utilities? The heat and lighting in a room powered by solar, tidal, nuclear, or wind energy is no different from that powered by oil, the only people who would know the difference are the owners and those providing the power. At this point, most rational thinkers may ask "Well if there's no noticeable difference in the quality of output between mediums, and such a large difference in the availability, why would anyone seek to maintain a clearly unsustainable process?" The answer to this is incredibly simple: because while oil companies have almost no control over the availability of oil, they have even less over that of renewable energy sources.

Oil companies can't produce oil. They can't create oil in laboratories, and despite what they want us to think, they can't magically just find new sources of oil indefinitely. What they can do is drill absolutely everywhere in an effort to find oil. Of course, the chances of just finding a profitable source of oil from digging in a random location are incredibly slim, or else we wouldn't have any sort of energy crisis at all. As we continue to use oil as our primary source of energy without the option of creating any more, it becomes a much scarcer resource, and therefore harder for oil companies to find. This is exactly why gas prices continue to rise. We are currently drilling for oil more than ever, and have better methods of deciding where to drill, but consumer demand for oil continues to increase while our world's supply only decreases as we use it. Now I'm no business expert, but the kind of exclusivity created by these supply and demand factors allows the sellers to raise prices. Allowing for domestic drilling may well open a number of new sources of oil, temporarily decreasing gas prices, but ultimately we would deplete these sources as we have others, leaving others in the same positions we are in now but without the possibility of further procrastination. So for oil companies, the choices are cut profits by maintaining consistent prices regardless of supply and demand factors, hope to maintain profits by continuously raising prices as supply continues to drop while demand raises, postpone inevitable declines in revenue due to supply and demand factors by finding new sources and therefore temporarily maintaining a supply, or produce energy from renewable sources so that their supply can always meet the consumer demand.

Unfortunately, most oil companies have chosen the third option since it means maintaining profits for now. Some have chosen to invest in renewable energy in the hopes that they can somehow make it as profitable as oil has been, but it never will be because making raw petroleum into an energy source requires so much more specialization than it does to harness renewable sources. First, it has to be found. Unlike wind, water, and sun, oil isn't abundant and unused. The geologists and other specialists who are hired by oil companies to determine where best to dig have to be trained, as do the hundreds of people who operate the equipment used to drill and regulate the output of oil. On top of that, oil has to refined before we can use it "efficiently." This forces oil companies to set up places whose only purposes are to turn raw petroleum into products suitable to burn for energy. In comparison to these factors, transportation of petroleum or already refined products is almost as nonexistent as oil companies' ability to produce more oil. The reason this specialization actually works (at least temporarily) for these companies, is that they can keep the whole process out of the hands of their consumers.

Compared to supplying a household with energy from petroleum based sources, doing so with renewable sources is amazingly simpler. With just a small initial investment, most American businesses could outfit themselves with instruments meant to collect and convert renewable energy sources into usable and sustainable energy. Oil companies don't want to invest in renewable energy sources because even though they would be able to keep profiting after we've completely exhausted oil sources, the profits would be so much less than what they make now in the face of such a crisis. Instead they've chosen to act as if they can solve this problem through procrastination, calling on American consumers to support them in their complete lack of responsibility. The only way American citizens can change this approach to renewable energy sources is to make oil less profitable, and the only real way to do that is to lower the demand for it while some supply still exists. If we were all to stop buying oil and petroleum based products, the oil companies would have no choices but to find some other way to profit or just give up. The sad truth behind every oil company is that while they fuel us, we fuel them, and they're not going to break this cycle as long as they can profit from it.