[RWebb]

There is about a 6 month supply of oil in Alaska's Nat'l Widlife Refuge (ANWAR).

Jim is quite right about US oil supplies. I have no idea why "you just can't buy the argument" - this is not a policy question, it is a factual issue. We have lots and lots of coal, but not much oil, and especially not much oil left (since we've been sucking it out of the ground for a century).

What we - and the Canadians - do have is tar sands. If we could extract oil from that (Alberta down to Colo.) then we'd have a lot of oil. Currently it is very expensive and requires a huge amount of water (very scarce in Colo.). There is a new process involveing CO2 extraction that is being worked on... You can also extract oil from coal - still very spendy.

AND once you've done that you still have the same pollution issues we have now - if not more.

The obvious answer is to use a fuel made from an easily harvested plant. Right now, we are suing corn, but that has some problems also (tho it does reduce imports from the Middle-East). The next step is use switch-grass. That requires some genetic engineering but looks quite feasible. Then you have nice supply of ethanol and bio-diesel. Add some mass transit, regional trains, solar power and you are in a 21st century energy world. At which point you can save quite a bit on hospitalization for pollution related health effects, for global warming economic impacts, and for having to fight wars in the Middle-East over & over again. The ME then becomes about as important to us as Bosnia or Rwanda or Kenya -- we can weigh in if we want, but it is not a national security imperative.

But right now, the numbers for usage are just way too huge for the above to make any impact, nor would using up all our liquid oil in the ground help much.