Regardless of anyones political brand, a fact that will have to be dealt with for decades is that fossil fuels will drive the global economies. Emerging and growing economies in China and India, with over a billion in population each,, alone will place upward pressure on oil prices. Add a devalued $ and they will rise more. Its on every corner and nearly all consumers buy gas and notice it in their personal lives. Few stop to think about the fact that nearly everything they consume is a petroleum by product. Plastic, glass, tape, cosmetics, medicine, steel, lubricants, paint, food,fabric, fertilizer etc.. All these items increase in price as oil goes up in price.

Wind and solar will never produce the chemicals that go into these products, nor will it power the trucks, trains and airplanes that distribute the goods. Our economy has benefited greatly from cheap energy for decades and no current alternative form of energy, given current technology, is even close to displacing fossil fuels at an affordable price.

Our greatest resource that can minimze economic and environmental impact is natural gas. Not perfect, but cleaner than coal, plentiful, and easy to develop and get to market. while alternative sources may help power homes and a few automobiles at some point,it is scientifically impossible to hope for much in the near term from these sources.

Any discussion about energy without costs per BTU as the central fact of science is nothing more than fantasy and idealogy. Green job technology at $4 million/job is economic suicide. European countries that have already went down that path are scrapping those programs and returning to sanity. Spain lost 2 jobs for every 1 green job created and is now expperiencing 26% unemployment and seeking a bailout from the IMF and European Central Bank to avoid collapse.

Current administrations subsidies for green energy are littered with failure. I am for developing these technologies, but fund the research at MIT, Stanford, U of Texas etc to develop and prove the technology commercially feasible before trying to force it on the marketplace. Quit giving it to political allies involved in commercial ventures that are abandoned as soon as the subsidy is withdrawn.

With shale technology, we are capable of completely cutting off hostile countries inports in 7-10 years if we gave it serious effort. I am sick of keeping thousands of troops, fighting wars, and spending financial and human capital so we can protect oil imports from our enemies when we can develop our own with, best estimate, 5 million new jobs over 5-7 years.if you factor that cost into a barell of oil, the true cost is above $150 a barell.

Only a an idiot believes we will ever be totally independent but it would be in our best interest to get what we need from Canada and other allies. Even the big greedy oil companies know that oil, made into by products, are worth 3-4 times more than using it as the primary source of transportation power.

Take a vacation to N Dakota, W TX, S TX, N LA and see first hand what good paying jobs are created by exploring for our own resources. Thousands of jobs are created outside those areas also. Caterpillar equiptment, drilling rigs, pipe, gaskets, lubricants, inspection equiptment, valves, well monitoring and emission monitoring equiptment, water purification, testing, maintainence equiptment and workers, hotels, restaurants, auto dealerships- I caould go on indefininitely having grown up around the industry but I find that most people dont realize the national benefit of energy development.

Ill quit for now but the way out of our situation isnt that complicated. It begins with creating GOOD paying jobs. Next we will tackle government spending-thats the other half of paving the road to prosperity.

Honestly, I don't get the whole "energy independence" thing. Yes, we're producing more domestic oil, but it goes into the world market. Even that vaunted pipeline from Canada which is supposed to solve our problems, I do believe from what I've read, only sends oil into the world market by tying into the pipelines that head to the tankers going wherever in the world tankers go.

So it's not like producing more oil here in the US makes us energy independent. Unless we were to somehow prohibit domestic oil from going abroad, which would have people screaming about communism and the threat to capitalism.

The only way more US oil helps bring down the price of oil overall is by increasing the world supply, and by that token it's also not like we can do anything to keep demand from rising in China and India, which of course increases the price. Even reducing demand here by making cars more fuel-efficient etc is only a blip compared to the entire rest of the world using more oil all the time.

At the same time too, there's a whole lot more to the price of gas than just the price of oil. Drill baby drill also requires build more refineries, both to meet demand and to provide some redundancy when the mysterious "refinery went offline" problems occur. And no one seems to want a new refinery in their backyard...

Unfortunately, Obama was right when he said the reason the price of gas went down is because demand went down, and why? Because fewer people buying gas means lower demand. Wanna bring on the next recession just to lower gas prices?

Another smoke sreen by the oi industry to raise prices. The industry has gone out of its way to

sabotage green iniatives. Back in 1979 many progressive proposals were initiated by federal

and state groups, backed by rebups and dems that were lobbied to death by the industry. The oil industry at that time proposed numerous regulations, that is right regulations, on alternatives to make it more costly and difficult to implement. Who says big corps don not like regulation. In their favor? Of course they like regs.