Running Out of Fuel, but Not Out of Ideas

We taught the world how to use nuclear power safely, and then pretty much abandoned it.
We've developed the best low-impact drilling techniques in the world, and we prohibit their use in vast oil reserves here at home.
We have hundreds of years worth of energy in the form of coal, and we're doing little to exploit it - even though technology for using it cleanly has been demonstrated repeatedly.
We've started building windmills and solar plants, but they will take enormous areas of land to provide higher cost energy than the alternatives - and they only supplement existing power sources when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing.
While the prices are high and profits are possible, we need to develop more of our own energy resources before others in the world own them.
Here are some excerpts from Ben Stein's column:

Everybody’s Business - Running Out of Fuel, but Not Out of Ideas - NYTimes.com:
". . .
Gasoline is unimaginably important in our lives in the United States. Without gas in virtually limitless supply, and at prices we could afford, American life would change. We could no longer afford to live so far from one another and from our jobs. We could no longer afford to cruise in cars incomparably larger than those of our counterparts in Europe and Asia. In a way, we would stop being America as we know it.

Maybe this would be a good thing. After all, do we really need to have a 6,000-pound S.U.V. take a 100-pound high school student across town to buy a Diet Coke? Do we really need cars so big that they have flat-screen televisions for the children in the back? Do we really need to pour so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? And it’s certainly not great to belch out immense quanta of carbon monoxide, a deadly poison.

But we have become addicted to gasoline. (I, of course, include my own bad self.) Even if we all bought smaller cars, we would need gasoline and lots of it — although a great deal less than what we use now. And while I have previously said, and I believe, that we are in a temporary price bubble, the prognosis for gasoline is grim in the long run.

Long ago, when I was a thin 29-year-old, as the Arab oil embargo was creating gasoline lines in the United States, we imported a bit more than one-third of the oil we needed. As a junior speech writer for President Richard M. Nixon, I wrote what I think was the first comprehensive message to Congress about a national energy policy. My superb bosses, Dave Gergen and Ray Price, edited it. But as a nation, we did almost nothing to enact the many plans we had to make ourselves energy independent. (To be fair, R.N. also imposed some really poor restrictions on energy, especially a mind-numbing set of price controls on oil, depending upon whether it was “old” or “new.” These were a pure negative.)

Now, imports supply nearly two-thirds of our daily needs, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. Most of this oil comes from countries that are either unstable (Nigeria) or whose leaders or people dislike us (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia). Even in Canada, long our best friend on earth, and an immense oil supplier to us, there is an active movement of environmentalists who believe it best not to develop Canada’s vast oil sands and send the oil to us. That movement has recently had some frightening success.
. . .
In my humble view, we are now in a short-term oil bubble. It will pass and correct, as bubbles do. And speculators will make millions, whichever way it goes. But the long run is terrifying. If we are at or past peak oil, if oil states stop or even hesitate to send us the juice, if Canada decides not to fill our needs, we are in overwhelming trouble.

So, what to do? First, we do not kill the geese — the big oil companies — that lay the golden eggs. We encourage them and cheer them on to get more oil. They need incentives, not hammer blows.

BUT most of all, we treat this as a true crisis. As my pal Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator, says, we need a new moon-shot mentality here. We need to turn coal into oil into gasoline, to use nuclear power wherever we can, and to brush aside the concerns of the beautiful people who live on coastal pastures (like me). And we need to drill on the continental shelf, even near where movie stars live. This must be done, on an emergency basis. If we keep acting as if the landscape were more important than human life, we will make ourselves the serfs of the oil producers and eventually reduce our country to poverty and anarchy."