In a controversial announcement, Whitman College announced that Ben van Beurden, the Dutch CEO of the Shell Oil Company, will be the next President of the college. This end of the search has come after months of shady backroom bar meetings at the Green, candidate interrogations and discussions with Grow Your Endowment Executive Search Consultants, the consulting firm hired to assist in the search process. The presidential search as a whole cost the school 70,000 dollars and two of George Bridges’ nine lives. Thus, the college is very excited to finally welcome van Beurden as a Whittie.

Although the divestment campaign is important, we can’t afford to politely ask that everyone around us change, oil companies included, if we can’t take the first step and change ourselves.

Unless we can significantly reduce our resource use in America, blaming environmental issues on overpopulation is simply unethical, leaving us with the hard choice: to stop having kids like we suggest to the third world, or consume less.

I ask you the question of where Obama is going to get the money to fund his alternative energy initiatives. While I do support a change to alternative energy, and I myself have never been to Alaska, I am having difficulty seeing feasible options other than tapping our Northern oil sources. The national deficit, courtesy of the previous administration, amounts to about an 11 trillion dollar deficit (US national deficit clock). To generate funds for an alternative energy future, perhaps it is necessary for the United States to start exporting more products while importing fewer products. One of the highly demanded products on the U.S. and worldwide market is sweet light crude oil. In this case, the U.S. has known reserves to mine which can generate funds for the push to alternative energy.