Oh my aching wallet!!!!

I didn't take this picture-the credit for that goes to an article I read on Yahoo regarding the current gasoline/oil crisis. It cost me $30.00 to fill my little Kia yesterday, and the tank wasn't even completely empty. We could be heading into a time of major crisis in this country and very soon. The rising cost of oil trickles down to everything else-airline tickets, your grocery store bill, services such as plumbing, etc. When gasoline becomes more expensive, so does everything else. My husband is in the construction industry and when the hurricane hit Louisiana last year, distrupting the oil refining industry, the cost of pipe rose, which meant that he had to raise his prices as well. There was a brief mini crisis in the plumbing industry when no one could find pipe, let alone afford to pay for it. And, speaking of Lousiana, due pollution caused by the oil industry Lousiana's state bird, the brown pelican, was wiped out in the state. We need an alternative source of fuel, something cleaner than oil (and coal) and something that will relieve us of our dependence on these foreign countries who are constantly in some sort of chaos and with whom the U.S. always seem to have issues. It would give me no greater pleasure than for our country to be able to tell them to take their overpriced oil and shove it up their collective arses. While I'm on my tirade, I also recently read an article on the mountaintop mining that is taking place in Appalachia. If you don't know anything about it, read up on it. It a shining example of how little the big wigs in the oil and coal industries actually care about the people off whom they're making money. There is a fantastic article in the May issue of Vanity Fair; I read it while I was on the treadmill at the gym and became so angry that my heart rate shot up even more (if you have any sort of environmental conscience it's probably not a good idea to read this article at the gym). The article details the whole process of mountaintop mining and relates that in Whitesville, West Virginia, children are going to school next to an open pit containing highly toxic liquid-the byproduct of cleaning coal. I don't know about you, but I don't want my daughter going to school anywhere near a place where she will be exposed to toxic chemical fumes of any kind, or where she could be the victim of a major accident should the impoundment holding the toxic brew fail and release all of it's foul waste. And I don't care how likey or unlikely it is that this would happen; I would't be willing to take a chance like that with my child's life, and I wouldn't support any company who would. I wonder if Greenpeace knows about this... Well, with that, we're going to go have dinner. I've made myself angry enough.