By: Deven Bhatia

               For the last ten years, oil has perhaps been the most common source of energy. There have been big moments in our decade where oil has played a tremendous role. For example, all of the tanks that have been used in the War on Terrorism, have used up two gallons of petroleum per every mile they travel. The U.S. Army has not only used tanks, but also helicopters and jeeps that are all powered by fossil fuels. The more vehicles we have deployed in the Middle East, the more oil we have used up and we don’t have enough oil reserves to provide for the amount of oil we are wasting. According to statistics given to by the OECD, the United States only owns 3% of the oil reserves in this world. We use up about 22% of the world’s oil today. This clearly means that to provide oil and petroleum for our country we must buy it from other countries and we have been doing this for the last ten years. Has it help our economy? No, it has actually really hurt our economy. We have a huge demand for oil from the other countries. The question does pop up about whether the United States went into Iraq, not only to defeat the terrorists and find traces of nuclear weapons, but also to gain a larger demand for oil so the wealthy people like President Bush who has large personal investments in the oil industry earn an extravagant amount of money. Another problem we had in our decade was the oil prices getting higher than ever before. The reason for that was that there was less oil being drilled in the United States and in other countries.  When there is less oil being drilled in other countries, the gas prices fly high in the USA. The other countries put a high price on the oil being exported to the United States and we have to buy it to power our cars and homes. The only significant events that in some way have lowered our dependency on oil is the making of the hybrid cars and the development of bio-fuel cars, and the production of the electric stove. When cars exert oil to keep them running, it destroys our environment and produces carbon emissions in the atmosphere which has led up to climate change. Oil is part of the reason why Global Warming has been presented by environmentalists in the last decade. In the last decade, our country has depended way too much on oil. Other ideas have been presented, but not performed to help our country. Environmentalists and energy experts hope that in the next decade we can look at different ways to provide the vehicles and utilities used by Americans in different ways than oil.