March 13, 2008 - Boneless Thursday did not go as planned. Normally I go to Buffalo Wild Wings every Thursday at lunch time to get wings for several people in the office. No one wanted it today, and I didn't want to drive all the way there just for myself, so I waited until dinner time for boneless wings. My cousin Mike met me there, and I got to try Parmesan Garlic for the first time. It tasted kind of like biting into a bread stick. I like the hotter ones like Asian Zing and Caribbean Jerk better. Having this new flavor today means I am close to reaching a milestone. There is only one flavor left for me to try - Wild. That is the second hottest flavor and I'm not sure if I really want to eat it, after having had Blazin', the hottest, and not being able to eat more than half of one. Mike and I drove to Cliff Stephens Park to play a round of disc golf. I narrowly beat him, 7 to 8. Then we went to the gym, and finally returned home to end the day. Today I'm going to tackle energy independence in my Presidential Issues saga. Energy is becoming a very hot issue thanks to a tanking US dollar and a rising demand for fuel oils. Prices for heating a home and driving a car are going up. These costs also affect the things we buy, since businesses need to heat their buildings and transport goods around, which uses lots of energy. I think there are two main facets to this issue. On one hand, trade is a very good thing. It is designed to take the abundant resources from one area and exchange them with the abundant resources of another area. In this case, oil is the major resource which is most abundant in Saudi Arabia, and our most abundant resource they want to exchange is the dollar, which they can use to buy a large number of things. Only, several things are happening. It is becoming more difficult to get the oil out of the ground as we reach further and further into the wells. The dollar is becoming less favorable as a currency on the open market, meaning our buying power is diminishing. Other countries are expanding from third world nations into major powers through industrialization, causing great increases in demand for oil. So, the thing that we want the most in trade is becoming harder and more expensive to acquire. The biggest problem with trade is that as we rely more and more on steady sources of oil via trade, we have created political enemies that seek to harm our supply of oil. As this political jokeying continues, we have instability which drives the price even higher, as speculators become afraid that supply lines could be cut given the right circumstances. But then there is the other facet of energy independence, which is that we need to take a very hard look in this country at our energy consumption and supplies, and see where there are opportunities to switch energy types and where we can reduce consumption. All across the country lights are on in parking lots and office buildings. Air conditioners run without recirculating the heat output back into their water lines to augment water heating. People leave their TVs on, cars sit in traffic burning gas, we keep producing new automobiles when we could be salvaging and restoring old ones. It is all these practices that lead to an energy use that could be significantly reduced, I daresay even halved, if we all took energy conservation serious enough. And there are lots of supplies of energy that have barely been tapped into. Solar power, wind power, tidal power, properly tapped could almost completely augment all home and commercial power consumption in the United States, leaving us with just demand for petroleum for vehicles and industrial high power needs. By creating jobs focused on energy conservation, and building an infrastructure of solar, wind, and tidal power (creating more jobs and opportunities), we could both stimulate the economy and reach energy independence. Wouldn't it be great if the United States, the largest consumer of energy, actually had an excess that could be sold to surrounding nations? It would help ease political tensions that result from other countries seeing us as an oil hungry country that will stop at nothing to suck oil from international suppliers. It will create multi-national companies with knowledge based in the United States focused on reducing energy consumption. We need to spend less and less resources on oil, and more on reducing our consumption and increasing our "alternative" output. Does that make me a liberal?