That precipitous drop at the end of Bush's term wasn't exactly due to a successful energy policy.
I would certainly say it was not aggressive enough in granting licenses, preventing public land lockup of vital resources, and not being forward looking enough for useful alternative energy (e.g. - nuclear). But compared to what we got now - licenses for drilling at 10% of the pre-PBO rate, etc - it looks pretty good to me. -XC
As far as policies, I think the US is going to be sitting pretty in a few years. A huge US natural gas supply is coming on line, and Obama doesn't seem to be getting in the way of that.
Chinese demand has outstripped our recession, I think. Plus the feds won't permit much new drilling and no new refineries will ever be built b/c of the EPA and local NIMBYs. Sad. _XC
We have thousands of years of easily accessible coal in this country and probably darn near as much oil. Probably making it "clean enough" is easier and cheaper than any alternative. -XC
- You should talk to people making not very much money -they're getting killed.
We could start by giving the oil subsidies back to them as a tax break. That might ease some pain. Every oil company is in the black. I agree it might be cheaper and easier atm, but the goal is to develop alternatives to get that competitive. That takes investment, and considering the possible benefits, I don't think we have been very serious about it: http://pre.cloudfront.goodinc.com/posts/full_1299596576_d235...
As an aside, if there was a high-speed rail between Detroit and Chicago, I'd visit Chicago twice as much.
Nuclear might be good if we could provide in on a grand scale, but I don't think that even the most optimistic forecast for nuclear are close to what would be needed to change energy prices in a significant manner.