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While I fully support the idea of improving the US's energy balance, I'm angered by the ignorant comments that accuse oil companies of raising prices, generating unfair profits, and ruining the economy. The oil companies don't set the conditions for energy use - they merely provide the hydrocarbons that we demand.
Their goal is to provide those hydrocarbons as cheaply as possible.

So the problem isn't with the oil companies. They are doing what we want them to do, what we pay them to do. The problem is with us. We simply use too much energy, and we are too spoiled and lazy to do anything to correct the problem.

So any plan to reduce US oil dependency has to start with reducing oil use through energy efficiency. That's the quickest, easiest, and cheapest solution. Everything else will take tens of billions of dollars of experimentation and technology dead-ends, as well as decades to be developed. But smarter energy usage can be implemented immediately, with existing technology. That's fuel-efficient cars, flourescent batteries, energy-saving windows and building techologies, rooftop solar systems, etc.

If you want to take money from the oil companies to finance advances in energy-efficient technology, that's fine. But don't throw the money away on "clean coal" or ethanol subsidies. Those technologies are either stupid boondoggles (ethanol from corn) or intermediate solutions that generate numerous problems of their own (clean coal).

Learn more about this author, B. B. James.
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