The half-a$$ US energy policy.

If we have an energy policy, I sure don't know what it is. I have the sickest feeling that for the past 20 years or so we've been eating our seed corn. I hope I'm wrong.

The only long term solution I can see is to develop fusion power, and then use the electricity generated to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen as fuel. We probably couldn't effectively spend much more than 3 to 4 billion a year in developing the first fusion power plants. As far as I'm concerned, we're guilty of criminal negligence that we haven't been steaming full speed ahead on this for years.

In the interim, expanded drilling in Alaska, and a gas pipeline from the North Slope to the lower 48 should have been in progress for years. A 50,000 BPD coal to syncrude Plant would cost about 3-5 billion, and would probably break even on operating costs (but you'd never get your investment back). We should have been building one of these every 12-18 months for the past 20 years. A 1-2 cent per gallon tax on gasoline and diesel would pretty much have paid for the program.

The first Mel Gibson movie I saw was "The Road Warrior". At the beginning of the movie black-and-white newsreel footage is shown of the world going to hell in a handbasket, while the narrator explains how it happened. At the end, he says in a voice full of dispair and disgust "and all they did was talk". That pretty much sums up how I feel about our Government (of all political parties) and our energy policy. We've known this day was coming since the early 70's, and we've done next to nothing about it.

Doesn't it scare you when someone as practical minded as Jim writes something like this? It does me.