Bush doesn't get it

All this rush to get off of dependence on foreign oil just shows how much of our policy is molded by public opinion and how much that public opinion is drawn to overly simplistic answers to very complicated problems.

The economy, whether you like it or not, is global. It does no good to decrease your consumption of foreign oil when none of your trading partners do the same. All you do is reduce your direct intake of oil, but in reality your actual intake includes the oil that all countries you trade with take in. Oil is a freely traded commodity. If you don't use it, the oil just won't go back in the ground. Your reduced demand will lower the price which in turn will entice someone else to purchase it. Typically that someone else will use the oil to make some good that they will sell to you.

This makes the whole excercise sound like a zero sum game. It isn't. You must include in the added cost for not using the oil. Renewable energy is nothing of the sort. It's sold that way to the public because the public is ready for easily consumed, pie-in-the-sky ideas. Solar panels must be built not from grass but from many different materials. They power they give you may appear to be free but that's because you haven't included in the cost of producing the panel in the first place. In actuality, solar panels do not return the amount of energy they consume in production. If they did, you'd see solar panel factories running on solar panels.

People. There ain't nothing like oil. The yield it gives is so much higher than anything else that nothing can compete with it (let alone provide the luxury it affords). It's yields are close to 300%. At 0% you break even and eventually die. Nuclear is barely over 10 and Solar and Wind are negative. One day oil may run out and on that day, we'll have to make do with a lot less than we do now.

Our best solution is to be as energy efficient as we can and keep looking for VIABLE alternatives. Look at it this way. The faster we use up Arab oil, the faster this problem with radical Islam will be behind us.