Silkroad Online Forums

Neither President Clinton or President Bush produced an energy policy. Sixteen years were wasted. The current three presidential candidates have shown little interest in reducing energy. America uses 7.5 billions barrels of oil a year, most of which is foreign oil. We need to conserve energy and at the same time aggressively drill for oil and build atomic power plants. It would be a big step just to eliminate the 2.5 million barrels of oil per day we recieve from the Middle East. Most of those people hate us! France produces 90 precent of its electrical power from atomic energy. Fifty percent of our electric power comes from coal-fired plants that leave a large carbon footprint.
The current presidential race has three politicians, but we are in dire need of a statesman. Two of the candiddates have suggested that the 18 cent federal gas tax be eliminated this summer. This cheap maneuver will get more votes and increase fuel consumption.
For various reasons, I am not voting for a president next November. None of the three candidates is qualified to lead a nation that is in big trouble--I have voted in every presidential election for more than 60 years.

--Dick Griffith
Anchorage

BRIC or BRICs are terms used in economics to refer to the combination of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. General thinking is that the term was first prominently used in a thesis of the Goldman Sachs investment bank.[1] The main point of this 2003 paper was to argue that the economies of the BRICs are rapidly developing and by the year 2050 will eclipse most of the current richest countries of the world. It's important to note that the Goldman Sachs thesis isn't that these countries are a political alliance, like the European Union, or a formal trading association, but they have the potential to form a powerful economic bloc.

Goldman Sachs argues that the economic potential of Brazil, Russia, India, and China is such that they may become among the four most dominant economies by the year 2050