Barack Obama is now the president of the United States of America. Now, more than making promises, he has to deliver on those promises and create real change.

The White House website had a complete makeover just as he was being sworn into office, and with that, his policy and agenda where added to the website.

You can view Obama’s agenda for energy and environment to review his plans.
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The conflict in the Middle East has prompted a surge in gasoline prices across the US. Despite the rise, gas prices are still down $1.44 cents from this time last year, when a gallon of regular cost $3.00. So much of it depends on if you think the glass is half full…or half empty.

I’ve always been one to believe that the glass is half full. As long as gas prices stay low enough that everyday Americans can afford the cost to get to work and back, it’s a good thing.

It will be interesting to see how the conflict in the Middle East turns out and how the transitional of power here in the US effects gasoline prices moving forward into the spring and summer of this year.

I love the satire in this video on how many people feel at the pump:

A common argument you will here from people against us blaming Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or a number of other countries for the high price of oil is that we import most of our oil from Canada. Yes, that is true, we do get most of our oil from Canada, here’s the chart that illustrates that:

However, what those same people fail to mention is that we get the majority of our oil from OPEC. OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) is a group of twelve states made up of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela and Ecuador.

OPEC takes up 7 spots in the top 10 countries that we import oil from. Even though we import most of our oil from Canada, we import 5.2 million barrels of oil per day from OPEC. The total from the top 10 is 8.4 million barrels of oil a day.

According to this chart, the U.S. imports 12.2 million barrels of oil a day, so that means just under half of our oil comes from OPEC.

This is exactly the reason why people blame OPEC for the rising costs of oil. They’ve had a monopoly on the market for the last 30 years, and as the world demands more, OPEC has a direct effect on the cost of oil.

This is just the reason why we need to end our dependence on foreign oil and develop alternative energy technologies to fuel our energy consumption.

This video can be found at NozzleRage.com, and you can sign up to receive further videos that they produce.