Energy Indepedence: The Backyard Principle

As in life, the further the distance between your needs and the resources to meet those needs…. the greater the risk of failure to meet those needs. Whether it be the inverse nature of federal tax dollars to local tax dollars, foreign grown versus local grown farm produce, or energy controlled by a valve thousands of miles away…the American Backyard holds promise to fixing what has ailed us for decades now.

America’s energy game of using up everyone else’s resources, before tapping our own abundance has seen its day. The game was over the day we invested the bulk of our manufacturing in creating the lower cost economies of China and India.

We created our own dilemma, so now we need to create our own unique solution.

We sit on centuries-worth of coal, have off-shore oil to merely tap and utilize, and we have regionalized energy reserves in the form of solar and wind to round out a robust portfolio for energy independence. This portfolio can only be complete with a greater foundation in safe nuclear power to balance the growing demand for cleaner energy.

Pennsylvania has been uniquely blessed with some of the largest reserves of Marcellus Shale http://www.pamarcellus.com/ beneath 60% our land mass. It creates the opportunity for not only lower cost energy, but jobs, alternate source of income and utilization of farmland, and bringing outside investment to the region to grow the State’s economy.

Pennsylvania was Texas before Texas, and the oil business certainly did wonders for both. Marcellus Shale gas is the new clean energy source unique to our own backyard, with process checks and oversight in place to protect the environment, as well.

We should never forget that we are a nation of backyards, a nation of states…states responsible to their citizens to secure their own destiny with the gifts God has laid out before them.

We will either thrive and flourish as Pennsylvania….or fail should we allow it….a Founding principle to remember ….that also came from our own backyard.