Energy Alternatives are Paramount

Many of our international problems would be solved if we weren't reliant on foreign oil. As it stands today, energy dependence allows the enemies of freedom to prosper. To silence the oppressors, we need energy alternatives that can be used around the world.

Gasoline prices are down all over the United States, and most of us are breathing a sigh of relief. I save about $25 every time I fill up my GMC Yukon compared to the highest prices we were paying 2 months ago. But there's a problem with these lower prices. When the cost of something is high enough there is a large incentive for innovators to provide a substitute for it. Which is exactly what American companies were starting to do when the price of gas was so high. Now that the prices are lower, it is not as cost effective to research alternative energy sources.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently stated that the one thing that has surprised her most in her current office is how dramatic is the effect of being dependent on other countries for our energy. Our energy-buying habits make us much less safe in the world, because the very money we spend to facilitate our transportation habits is being used in many cases by despots and dictators to undermine and destroy America.

Democrats must know how precarious our situation is when they vote in such silly ways as to prohibit many types of off-shore drilling and to whine about the non sequiturious problems that drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would cause the wildlife there.

But meanwhile:

• The former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimr Putin can see a direct relationship between Russia's turn away from democracy and liberty and the country's takeover of its largest energy companies.
• Iran earns tens of billions of dollars from its oil exports, much of which it bribes its own people into living with their serf-like lives, and some of which it gives to its brainchild, Hizballah, which terrorizes Lebanon and now has Israel in its sights.
• Hugo Chavez, the butcher of Venezuela, has similarly bought off the Venezuelan underclass and used surging oil revenues to support other freedom-squelching dictators in Latin America, and has gone a-whoring with Iran.

The problem will not be entirely solved if the United States becomes energy independent. Rather, we will come much closer to a solution that makes us secure if we can create new forms of energy that are usable the world over. If we get the Chinas and the Europes of the world to, with us, reduce their dependence on oil as a form of energy, then we significantly reduce the sabber rattling and America-taunting that worthless crackpots like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are currently so proud of.

When we take away these despots' overweening means of income, we not only give the Venezuelan and Iranian people a much greater chance of living in freedom, we provide their self-selected 'leaders' much less of an opportunity to undermine America as well.