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I heard an economist say the other day that, the best thing to reduce the cost of high oil prices is high oil prices. America's ingenuity is still the best in the world. At our bi-weekly bagel meeting, our top minds were discussing alternative energy supplies (we are not an energy company). Exciting times for entrepreneurial types.

This is quite right. Energy is the most exciting field in the world right now with everyone trying to find new and different and innovative ways to supply it. Given the freedom, the market will develop the worthy ideas into viable, profitable solutions.

And that is what liberals cannot allow. At these higher prices, alternative hydrocarbon sources like oil shale, tar sands, coal gas, etc. as well as additional drilling suddenly look palatable and may be added to the usable energy supply easily. Thus, they fight tooth and nail to hamstring these efforts and instead push currently unviable ideas like wind, solar, biofuels, etc and ridiculous solutions like electric cars.

There's a reason we use gasoline in our cars. It has a high energy content and is liquid at room temperature making it easy to handle. You can't put wind in your tank. And you can't store large amounts of electricity efficiently. CNG has to be stored at 3000 psi. Hydrogen is pipe dream that's a) not an energy source, but an inefficient transmission medium and b) difficult to handle. And the energy balances on ethanol and biodiesel as well as their feedstock supply constraints make them unviable for our massive economy, too. And thus the currently unviable options must be currently pushed, so they grow the crisis and thus their power over over us.