Our Fuel Needs

HT to a regular reader of this blog---a rare great letter to the Tribune (August 4th):

I am amazed that you built a headline article recently over 2 pounds of mercury per year from the BP Whiting refinery.

It is indicative of how naive you are about the importance of that refinery to our future gasoline needs.

I am a retired oil executive. I despise BP for the way it has treated the Amoco people after the merger.

However, I must give it credit as a consumer for stepping up to spend $3 billion on a hundred-year-old refinery to give us a secure source of gasoline.

If you want to know why there have not been any new refineries build in this country in 50 years, read your recent articles.

That refinery is a blip on BP's balance sheet. If your goal is to get this refinery closed, park your car and pump up those bike tires. There is no viable way to replace that amount of gasoline in the Chicago market. You will have a lot to write about with $5 gasoline and lines.

I care about my kids and grandkids, and I care about Lake Michigan. But I know gasoline does not come from God, Mayor Richard M. Daley, Springfield, Washington or the Tribune. It comes from Whiting in Chicago. At least most of it does.

Spend some time with BP and the Environmental Protection Agency, study the supply-and-demand situation in Chicago, see what the real threat to the lake is and look at the trade-offs.

Learn that trade-offs that are reasonable have always been necessary to sustain our prominent position in the world.

My grandkids will be the first generation in this country to have a poorer standard of living than their parents. We have ourselves to blame.

We elect officials who pander to your spun journalism and the result is paralysis. No action occurs, no decisions get made and we continue to mortgage the future.

Bill Robertson

Wheaton

Another good letter August 5th:

The Tribune continues for weeks to print half the story on BP pollution. It is economically impossible to have a large expansion of an oil refinery without an increase in pollutants. BP is not a villain. Expansion of oil refineries is good for the U.S. But politicians and many others continue to spout outrage over more pollutants in Lake Michigan.

Dirty politics again win over what's good for the country.

Ed Tobey

Lake Bluff

Related post: Hot Air in the Second City