You need to drill now, because we will always need oil, even if it's just to make plastic. If you drill in the deep ocean, and it takes 10 years to see oil, then maybe we'll avoid a crisis 10 years from now, but if you don't I guarantee you we will have a crisis in 10 years. If the idiots had started drilling 10 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess were in now. You realize that a lot of the rise in the cost of oil is due to speculators. Speculators buy and sell based on the future. And, if all they see in the future is short supplies, then they drive the price up. If we get busy developing future supply, well then the speculators see abundant supply in the future and lower prices. Cause and effect, action and reaction. It's the capitalist way. It really is the way the speculation market is suppose to work. It rises prices early to force a earlier reaction to a predictable problem. We just hate paying, to be told we're screwing up.
I see wind, solar, and geothermal in our future. But, they all have drawbacks. Some due to red tape, and or environmentalist meddling, others are technical issues that need to be solved, and some are just the shear amount of material we are talking about. We need 4 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy, that's more than 4 million wind generators, which would cost about $8 trillion dollars. That's why it takes so long to implement, it's huge. The idea should be to invest in homegrown power and fuels, so we stop buying from countries that hate us. Then sell that knowledge to other countries. We don't want to be caught having to buy the know how from someone else.
I say do this, and we won't have to send $700 billion a year out of country, we can keep it here, creating jobs that mostly can't be exported. We could employee a lot of people with $700 billion a year.
