A personal analogy:
On my new house, the toilets had a problem flushing. Ok, long and short of it is that I had to replace all of my external sewage pipes. Rather than a new car, I had no choice but to fix an infrastructure issue. We don’t choose our choices sometimes, they merely happen.
How will we cope with $5/gal gas? We will cope. No one asked that this happen but it is now in our laps and we have no choice but to adapt/pay the price and move on. It will get fixed, we will be better, and we will move on.
Of course we will "cope." How and what effect will this have on the economy, business and the consumer? Who is going to fix it and how are the real questions.
This country will crash BIG TIME by the time alternatives are found, if we continue to not drill for the 300 billion barrels of oil we have in the west, Alaska and off the coast. And for what. Fish? Caribou? Bugs? The cost of oil effects, directly and indirectly, almost every aspect of our lives.
And then there's the problems with those technologies [example: hybrids. What happens when all those batteries (read heavy metals) have to be dumped]. They don't know. And they haven't thought it out.
And believe me, the folks who really push alternatives are Luddites. I live in New York, on Long Island. They stopped a nuclear power plant [too dangerous], hydro-power from Quebec [the electric cables under the Sound were bad for the fish], a coal fired plant [bad for the air]; and are currently in the process of stopping a natural gas barge [too dangerous again] and a wind farm in the Sound [bad for the birds]. They won't be happy ‘til we flood the fields, grow peat, wait a million years, and burn that.
Want an energy program? Repeal state and federal gas tax. Have the federal government preempt energy policy and start building nuclear power plants. Modify or dump the Clean Air Act, and build more refineries [tax credits]. Junk, or modify the Endangered Species Act; and drill in Alaska, the Dakotas, Montana, and off the California Coast. Lower tariff and other barriers to Canadian oil shale oil. Invest in its development. Give tax credits, and interest free loans to developers of PRACTICAL AND EFFECTIVE alternate energy processes.
In a century or so, we may be able to be off oil. But the infrastructure isn't ready, and change [unless you're Urkel]isn't going to come that quickly, or in the magnitude needed in the short haul.
Oh, yeah. And it would be a dynamite issue for any GOP candidate. Except THIS GOP candidate