U.s. Government Should Stop Investing - 1392 Words

The U.S. Government should stop investing in oil because it has proven to be harmful to the environment, such as the BP oil spill in 2010, and oil has historically been destructive to our economy. Oil costs far too much money; from costing consumers in gasoline money, to wasting far too much money on the recovery of oil spills. The government should invest money in renewable resources instead of oil. One reason the government should stop investing in oil because it has a negative impact on our environment. One of the most striking examples of this is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The spill covered the ocean floor and surface with oil throughout the gulf and beyond. Overall, the impact from the spill can still be seen in†¦show more content†¦The clean-up effort is taking even more time because of the erosion that has increased in those areas with the oil that was deposited. Oil damages the environment in other ways, such as the emissions oil produces into the a tmosphere. Bryan Walsh says in his article, Over a Barrel, in TIME Magazine, that with the price of oil dropping, the urgency to find an alternative energy source is not where it should be. Walsh states that while we are not working to find another source to replace oil, the dependence on oil will only increase. It is estimated that oil production will increase by 20 percent by the year 2020. With the increase in production, CO2 levels will only increase in the atmosphere which will deteriorate the ozone layer of the atmosphere (Walsh). Economically, the oil industry will only pull us down as a country. Professionals believe that even though oil prices are falling, the production will start slowing and the prices will skyrocket again. The typical consumer would see that the price of oil barrels has fallen from one hundred to eighty dollars in the past year, but the consumer will not see the impact it will have outside of gas prices. Back in 2005, sixty percent of U.S. oil was import ed, and the effects of a drop in prices would have been observed in the countries that we imported from. Today, however, only thirty percent of our oil is imported. With such a high amount of domestic oil, the low prices impacts the American