We are currently fighting a war over petroleum.  Besides the war in Iraq, the price of gasoline has created havoc in our economy.  An argument could be made that the severe weather that we’ve been experiencing the last several years, which has interrupted the flow of fuel to the United States, is due to our use of oil.  Oil prices seem to be on an ever-upward trajectory affecting the price of everything it touches.  Food prices have just started to go up and I don’t think that trend will change anytime soon.  Most of the chemicals used in agriculture are made from petroleum.  The fertilizers and pest controls are made from petroleum.  The equipment used to plant, maintain and harvest the crops run on petroleum.  The trucks and trains (and planes) that transport our food around the world to our tables run on petroleum.  Every step of the process is dependent on this weak link in the world economy.  We’ve seen it happen before and we’ll see it again in the future.  And, the food chain is only one example.

The solution is not a gas tax holiday or a never-ending investigation into the oil companies’ motivations; the United States hasn’t controlled the oil markets in decades.  We are no longer the largest producers of oil and we are quickly getting stiff competition for the use of oil from countries such as China and India.  They’ve only just begun to get addicted to the stuff.  Depending upon the opinions I read, there may well be enough oil in the ground to last us forever, but that oil is getting exponentially more difficult to reach and process – increasing the cost every year just to produce it.  And much of it is not under North America.

The only long-term solution to our oil problem is to replace oil.  The logical thing would be for the oil companies to use the billions of profits they’ve made lately to convert their already-existing infrastructure to an alternative fuel system.  That’s not likely to happen.  They seem to be quite happy taking their profits to the bank; or spending ever more money on exploring and drilling for oil that is more rare and more difficult to attain.  What will have to happen is the federal government will have to step in to ensure that our economy in the future will not falter.  Our entire economy is held hostage to the price and supply of gasoline and the only solution is to walk away from it.  This is a national security issue.

The American people must demand that our government fix the solution.  We need a Manhattan style project or something similar to Kennedy’s call for the Space Race.  We’re spending billions of dollars a year in Iraq to secure oil for our economy.  We’re running trillions of dollars in debt.  What’s a few billion dollars compared to that.

We are the United States.  We do big things.  We started the “grand experiment” of Democracy.   We started the industrial revolution, invented the telephone, the computer, got to the moon, developed the Internet, and the mobile phone.  Now we even have a surrogate scratching in the dirt on Mars.  We’ve cured hundreds of diseases, extending life expectancy easily into the 70 to 80 year range.  

There are already several solutions in consideration that may or may not work out in the long run.  Every university in the country should have massive amounts of funding to find the solution for this problem (a readily available alternative to a gasoline powered car) in 10 years.  Let the Middle East go back to life in the 10th century, as many of them seem to want.  We would no longer have to spend money in that region to keep millennial tribal fights under control.  Our economy will get back to the business of producing the next wonderful way of life not having to peer around the corner trying to guess when the next ransom note is going to arrive from OPEC.