Hello energy so let's take a big picture overview of what this course is about,
and what topics were going to cover, and why we need to look at them.
So energy in the news we see what the headlines
about the wildly fluctuating oil prices, oil doubling,
going up to $150, particularly in 2008 before the economy collapsed.
In fact, we'll look at some of the coupling between
the fact that the economy collapsed because the energy cost was,
oil cost in particular was putting such a burden on our economy.
We'll look at the Middle East geopolitical chaos and how that impacts us.
How much oil do we get out of the Middle East?
How does that impact it, and impact us, and
how does that impact the cost of our oil?
We hear that OPEC, as strong as they have been in the past,
that they're now irrelevant.
We'll see about how relevant that statement is.
We'll look at the US energy independence.
We hear a lot about we need to be independent in energy
from other countries in dependence.
However in 2014 we're importing about 40% of the oil.
Are we heading in the right direction?
Because we were importing as much as 65% of our oil from other countries.
And we'll look at emissions, and for instance, electric cars.
Do they really have zero emissions?
Most of the electric cars have an emblem on them that says zero emissions.
We'll look at the environmental impacts on things, and
look at some of those statements.
The impact of the dollars flowing out of the US because of imported oil,
we look at the importance of that and look at the facts regarding that.
National security, as I mentioned, the national security issue, of course,
is important, because if we're importing a lot of oil from a particular set of
countries and they decide to embargo us as the OPEC did back in the 70s,
it places us in a very difficult position.