Pork is the currency that allows anything to get beyond research or proposal ... and pork, like politics, is always local.

In the 1950s and 1960s, we used to have oil spills in Lake Michigan, from tankers sinking or just from ships cleaning out their bilges and tanks. Nasty globs of nasty stuff used to wash up and foul the beaches.

I have looked out on Lake Michigan all my life. For the past fifteen years at least, the horizon almost always (say, 360 days per year) has awful brown smog that it did not have before.

Now, McCain wants to allow oil rigs in Lake Michigan?

Oil's time is past. We still can pump it to make plastics and such, for a while. But it's over. The first step to recovery is quitting. The first step toward absolution is confession.

Shit. That's a given already. It's not just a matter of losing oil and gas as energy sources. Once oil hits $300/barrel are we ready for the majority of our manufactured goods to increase by 50-200%? Look around you and find five things not made of plastic. I sort of fancy a birds eye maple laptop. I'm kind of surprised Sharper Image or Neiman Marcus hasn't introduced this sort of thing already.

I'm more sanguine about the predicted fertilizer shortage - we should be using composted matter for this anyway. But oil has more important uses in our modern oil than being a fuel source.

Although Elephantman and his friends seem to think that the obscene wealth they're gathering to themselves in the fossil fuel industry and energy markets will allow them to separate themselves from the rest of us riffraff and breath different air than we do by building gated, domed communities as needed, they're wrong. May they choke on their wealth and their rank indifference to the well being of this marvelous planet we share and to future generations that will still have to survive here.

This was one of your clearest, best spoken posts ever, Andrew! Thanks for cutting through the B.S. to lay out what the issues really are, here!

The way I see it is that Bush simply has nothing to offer but dinosaur strategies like more drilling to combat the energy crisis. In his first speech on this issue he argued for drilling in ANWR, now he's arguing for off-shore. The basic lack of creative, outside of the box thinking is really what dooms this approach, never mind whether it would or wouldn't drive prices down. As Andrew points out, it might do so for the short term, but it's no long-term solution.

What surprises me is that McCain is hitching his cart to this flaming Hindenberg of a policy. If people have any sense at all and are as weary and wary of the intellectually bankrupt Bush agenda as I am, he has no chance this fall.

McCain just announced that he wants to build forty-five new nuclear reactors, in addition to all those new oil rigs!

According to the article, the total recoverable oil from both ANWR and offshore is 30 billion barrels. Sounds like a lot, until you do the math.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2006 the US consumed 20.7 million barrels of oil per day.

(See http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html)

In round figures, that means that the 30 billion barrels waiting to be extracted would feed our habit for ~ 1,500 days -- just a little over 4 years at present consumption rates.

The solution to solving our energy needs is to be found in expanding the role of renewable energy and reducing our consumption. Nothing else has a chance of penciling out.

Gated and domed!

Although Elephantman and his friends seem to think that the obscene wealth they're gathering to themselves in the fossil fuel industry and energy markets will allow them to separate themselves from the rest of us riffraff and breath different air than we do by building gated, domed communities as needed, they're wrong. May they choke on their wealth and their rank indifference to the well being of this marvelous planet we share and to future generations that will still have to survive here.

This was one of your clearest, best spoken posts ever, Andrew! Thanks for cutting through the B.S. to lay out what the issues really are, here!

-- gkrevvv

You are all entitled to your environmentalist views. But if that's your pleasure, please don't send out people like Dick Durbin and Nancy Pelosi to complain about high gasoline prices. Because they are liars and hypocrites, claiming that "American families" need lower gasoline prices but also need to use less oil.

On the other hand, if people like Durbin want lower gasoline prices for their constiuents, there are things they can do. They can lower gase taxes in high-tax states like Illinois. They can reduce taxes that discourage oil exploration and production. And they can help the President find ways to expand the areas for oil exploration.

You can take your pick with either one. But you can't have it both ways.

The REAL argument is NOT whether drilling offshore and in ANWR will free us from dependence on foreign oil (it won't). Nor is it whether drilling in those locations will wreak environmental havoc (it probably would). It's that aggressively exploiting those resources will create an illusion that will only exacerbate our current energy death spiral.

We were taught, but clearly failed to heed, this same lesson once before, after the oil shock of the mid-1970s. After that, government policy focused on forcing oil prices down and keeping them low. Did people by then realize the wisdom of smaller vehicles, energy-efficient homes, and mass transit?

FUCK NO! In accordance with the Reagan-era cult of shameless extravagance, they went out and bought the street equivalent of the Death Star, built 10,000 sq. ft. McMansions, and voted down light rail because the additional tax bite would preclude being able to afford fender skirts and curb feelers on their new Hummers.

Ideally, we should be true to our inner tree huggers and leave those resources lie. The sad truth, though, is that we may well eventually NEED to tap some of that oil. The purpose, however, WON'T be to make this country "energy independent." The available resouce is now simply too scarce to achieve that end. Prudently exploited, these resources MIGHT at some point buy us the time to keep our economy from tanking, our bodies warm in winter, and our (hopefully fuel-efficient) vehicles from becoming so many scattered monuments to gluttonous human folly.

The problem we have now that we didn't have in 1975 is that now there are 2.5 billion Asians whose appetite is not only just as ravenous as ours for that precious crude, their bank accounts (and accounts receivable ledgers, as well) are also FLUSH with American dollars to buy it with. And make no mistake: If Li Wong or Rajiv Sanjpie offer so much as a nickel more for a barrel of oil, I don't care whether it's pumped from ANWR, the Everglades, off Malibu, or from directly under the White House, Exxon-Mobil will be more than happy to sell it to THEM instead of YOU!

The only real way to ultimately render the price of oil irrelevant to this country is to use less of it - a LOT less! And the time to begin that project is - WAS - 1975.