Drill your way out of incompetance

If the US government were running a business, it would be out of business. Forget the fact that the country is in debt above its eyeballs, and let's focus on the shortage of one of the drivers of the entire country (no pun intended) - oil.

The production of oil within the USA has dropped since mid last century while, during the same period of time, the demand has risen sharply. Making matters worse, many "developing nations" are now "developed" and more will get there one day. This will continue to drive the demand for oil up, even if the demand within the USA falls. Some may see this statement as an obvious, but clearly the US government has failed to understand.

Environmentalists have battled against drilling and refining within the USA, but seem content with doing the same in other countries. Is the damage from drilling in another country not as bad as the damage created in your own country? The environmentalists are actually happy to see the prices increase because they see an opportunity for alternative energy. But what alternative? No doubt the USA needs to do much more to conserve energy, and to develop alternative sources, but we cannot cut off our nose to spite our face. You never cut off one option without having another. We should have been leveraging the oil resources in our own country for the past 50 years. We should have also been more aggressively investing in alternative energy sources while offering healthy incentives to industry and consumers for developing and using them. We did neither of these things!!!

What do we do now? First, we start drilling in Alaska yesterday. With today's advanced drilling techniques, the process will pollute the land with less oil in a years time than what is spilled in a Wal-Mart parking lot over the same period of time. We must offset the demand of developing nations with our own oil. At the same time, we need to invest heavily in alternative energy. By the way, during my last visit to Los Angeles, I saw more electric vehicles on the road than I have seen in all of Europe. In fact, you cannot even readily buy an electric vehicle in Switzerland (correct me if I'm wrong). So - let's not assume it cannot be done!!

The government has failed the American people. Let's hope they grow a brain soon, otherwise prices will continue to rise and will take the economy down...