One day the oil reserves in Alaska will be critical to our survival, it would be a shame to use them up now so Joe Sixpack can buy cheaper gas on the way to the baseball game.
I don't think you fully grasp the significance and scope of the problem.
Just three years ago, when gas was around $1.75 here in New Hampshire, someone making minimum wage had to work for only 20 minutes to buy a gallon of gasoline.
Now, with regular gas averaging $3.88, someone making minimum wage now has to work twice as long - 40 minutes - to buy that same gallon of gasoline. He's also likely to have an old car which doesn't get great mileage, let's say 20mpg. If he lives 20 miles from work, for instance, now a full hour and 20 minutes of his day are spent just paying for what it took to get there and back in the first place. Not including oil changes, nor air filters, not even the quarter for the air hose at the gas station. Not even the ethanol-inflated cost of the food he eats for lunch.
The people on the economic margins are getting crushed by this, just CRUSHED, exactly because our Democratic leaders were too short-sighted and venal, too obsessed with meaningless posturing against "big oil" and "Halliburton," to INCREASE our nation's energy security and independence, rather than CRIPPLING it.
And even though I'm assuredly NOT at the economic margins, I just got laid off last Thursday after eight years in a well-paid technical professional job in the Information Technology department of a global corporation - it's ridiculous think that the spiraling costs of energy that are hammering the SG&A numbers of this and every other global corporation had nothing to do with my layoff to reduce the IT department's contribution to SG&A.
Cars can't run on Congress' "alternative energy" hot air. Pie-in-the-sky alternative energy notions won't get me rehired.