What we do not have is the political will. Recent cable news chatter is starting to focus on the limitations we put on oil companies to drilling off-shore, here in the US. A recent deep drill discovery off the coast of Brazil, has everyone excited and logically oil companies will use this leverage to petition politicians for the rights to do it here. At this high price we can afford to drill deeper, so why not let us do that, is the logic.

Flawed, short term thinking is what I would say. If deeper and deeper drilling becomes a profitable play now, so do alternative energies. This has long been held against new technology. Great idea but can we make money at it? The answer is yes.

Recently profitable:

http://solarenergynewsandreview.blogspot.com/2007/02/first-solar-sees-first-profit-in-20.html

Superstar performance with a 43% stock gain yesterday.

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/080508/ener10-q.html

Major gains

http://www.evergreensolar.com/app/en/investors/

It would take years and billions of dollars to build these off-shore rigs, assuming we gave away the rights to drill there. Why wouldn’t it make more sense to invest this money in renewable technologies?

Stop short term thinking, believe in ourselves and our ability to overcome challenges, believe in our technical and scientific community, and support and promote a long term solution to this current challenge.

In summary, this is where our imports come from;

Obviously we have some potentially problematic sources here. Countries, with shall we say, problems with the western culture. We need to reduce, no, how about eliminate our need for imports from these countries. We have done this before.  You don’t see Iran on the list because we stopped imports from Iran awhile ago. Why not more countries?

This ‘oil economy’ creates the need for ‘oil politics’. We feel we must protect our interests by propping up these countries economies.  In most of the cases the countries are run by dictators or monarchs that spout abuse to the US, do not support human rights and make themselves rich. Later for that. Make it a priority to eliminate these sources. My Axis of Oil list would include; Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Angola, Kuwait, Algeria, Congo, Chad, Russia.