If You Think The Price of Gas Here Is Bad--Look At Israel (Updated)

Six Kids and a Full Time Job writes that Gasoline in Israel is $8.50 Per Gallon!!:

I filled up my tank the other day on my Volvo S40. Over 400 NIS. With the weakening dollar that is about $120! Gasoline here is now $8.50 per gallon (Interesting piece here at Greenweb) and is showing no signs of stopping.

With that as a backdrop, Prime Minister Olmert's decision to stop building the high speed rail link between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (link in Hebrew) is worse than bewildering. It is downright dangerous.

By way of looking for solutions, he has the following video by T. Boone Pickens--

Pickens also has an op-ed in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:

...How will we do it? We'll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the "Saudi Arabia of the Wind"? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.

I believe this plan will be the perfect bridge to the future, affording us the time to develop new technologies and a new perspective on our energy use.

Read the whole thing.

According to Pickens, the US could cut oil imports by 38% and save $300 billion a year by implementing his plan, which would take less than 10 years to put into place--assuming the right leadership.

Times a'wastin.
(Now, does Pickens have any advice for Israel?)

UPDATE: Michael Granoff, Head of Oil Independence Policies for Project Better Place will be speaking on Israel: Leading the World into the Post-Oil Age at the Lincoln Square Synagogue on Wednesday, July 30.

I guess that means Israel is doing something--hopefully they are doing a better job on oil dependence than they are doing with their reservoirs.

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