Here's how you solve both: The United States initiates a true self sufficiency program with regards to energy. Something on the scale of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. They ended up spending $116 Billion dollars laying out the highways which in todays dollars is equal to about $833 Billion dollars. Not chump change.
The good news is my proposed solution already has the infrastructure almost started.
What we do:
The government MASSIVELY starts subsidizing any alternative energy source that gets us off of foreign oil. Bio-diesel, solar, wind, ethanol, you get the point. The emphasis should be on upgrading existing systems, not putting new systems in place, like a hydrogen economy would need.
How would they subsidize it? The subsidies would pay for solar and wind installations costs over and above what it would cost for them to install petroleum consuming resourses. Including, half of the cost of solar panels that the typical homeowner could install on his home to power up. Make it a no brainer to take your house off of the electrical grid. More specifically, a no painer.
The political results would be interesting and rapid:
First, we would lose almost all interest in what happens in the Middle East. The only thing we would have left to defend there is our interest in Israel. (Which I'm afraid would also deminish in proportion to our dependancy on the oil reserves of their neighbors.)
Second, oil countries would have to change their welfare state structure because they wouldn't be getting so much of their funding directly from the gas pumps of America.
Third, America would once again be creating resourses rather than consuming them. No one ever built strength by only consuming. You must CREATE resourses. Mine them, grow them, generate them, whatever. Wealth does not ever flow away from resources. It flows to them.
Yes, this is a kind of econmic warfare, but if we don't do it now, we aren't going to be left with the choice. Eventually the warfare will be even more real than Iraq. It will involve the entire region and could spread to other oil producing states.
The lines are now open for your critisisms.
And now for something totally different:
I don't know if I can keep watching American Idol now that Lakisha is gone.
