How long will we continue to watch oil prices rise before we do something?

Question

this is our contry people and it is hurting because of the gas price now what are we going to do about it their is a lot of smart people out their let me know what you think we can do

Answer 1

The best thing we can do is allow for domestic exploration and drilling.  We can compete and drive the price down.  This has benefits on foreign policy too.

Answer 2

you need to vote for candidates who have sound thinking behind their policy positions

you need to ask your suppliers for fuel efficient homes, cars, and modes of transportation.  if we demand more fuel efficient products, and resist the purchase of those that are not, we create the powerful incentives manufacturers need to invest in changing factories, product designs and marketing efforts to bring about the new lines of products we now desire

we need to understand that changing our infrastructure from oil/carbon based energy sources like oil and coal, to renewable energy from wind, solar, tidal and geothermal will take an initial investment, but deliver huge returns on investment, both financially and environmentally.   We can depend on India and China to continue to grow, and to continue to drive demand for carbon based energy, so that the investors in alternative sources will be able to reap large profits, because the price of carbon energy is going to remain high, and therefore demand for alternatives will be high.  People can afford to pay for a new type of transportation as long as its total operating cost is lower than the carbon alternative.   that was tough when gas was $2.  It gets a lot easier at $4 and $5 a gallon gas.

So what you want is to get free of oil dependency, not drive the price of gasoline back down.  Because if all we do are some short term measures to drive the price down, we doom ourselves to revisit this problem again and again.

Let's solve it with intelligent investment in the R&D and infrastructure we need to move people and products around the country with a lower carbon footprint and at a lower cost.  It can be done, we have the technology.  we need the political will to make the large scale changes we need to tap into what exists today, and what can reasonably be expected to be here in a few short years.

Answer 3

we need to start conserving our gas and our oil and instead get smart cars. Also, we take advantage of everything in our daily life and we need to stop

Answer 4

We should have done it years ago--begin working on the next big source of energy.  We saw this coming during the Carter administration.  Carter put programs in place that would have had great success by today, but Reagan couldn't wait to stop them, to 'let the market decide'.

We could put an excess profits tax on the oil companies and use the money to develop public transportation.  We could get Lockheed Martin out of the business of making new elaborate weapons systems that we don't need and can't use, and instead have them build a high-speed railroad across the nation that would use 1/4 the fuel per passenger as airlines.  We could go back to CAFE laws (Corporate Average Fuel Economy).  We could restore government funding to the program to develop hybrids--Bush de-funded hybrids to fund hydrogen, but hydrogen will take 30-40  years to show results and hybrids are available NOW.

We could stop developing suburbs out in the country and begin 'back-filling' the areas between developments so people would have a shorter average distance to work.  

The biggest thing is we could bring our troops home from Iraq and spend that two trillion dollars instead on energy research, so it would help -everyone- instead of just the oil companies and weapons developers.