No, We Will Never Be Oil Independent

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Republicans have lately ratcheted up their “Drill Baby Drill” rhetoric, and they can now frequently be found claiming that the United States has enormous oil reserves that could make us energy independent if only we opened up drilling everywhere within shouting distance of our borders. This came up yet again during last night’s Republican debate and I briefly thought about mentioning how inane this has all become in a blog post. But it was only a few minutes until dinner time, so I skipped it.

Luckily, Michael McAuliff at the Huffington Post has done it for me. You can click the link for details, but the bottom line is that if we damned the torpedoes and drilled like maniacs in every single oil-bearing formation in the country, it would….barely make a dent. Global oil prices would hardly respond at all and we’d continue to import huge amounts of oil every day.

We do have lots of coal, and we also potentially have lots of natural gas depending on whether fracking can be done without destroying the environment. The jury is still out on that. But oil? Forget it. We just don’t have very much no matter how crazy we go.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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