4 dollar gas? What 4 dollar gas?

I've been without a car so long, I'd literally have to think hard about how long it's been. I got rid of it basically to get rid of the hassle of the heavy metal burden and the bureaucracy and expense that goes with it; but of course not having one brings brand new hassles. Luckily, I live in a city with an excellent public transportation system(for an American city, that is).

With my new job in-relatively- far-flung Olney, Maryland, the bear of a commute has me actually scanning for cars in the classifieds to buy. It's an inconvenient time to do so, of course, with gas prices as they are. There is nothing that foments people to action quite like an upsetting of the status quo and this- along with the mortgage crisis- is doing this in a way that Americans haven't seen since the late Seventies. But we need to step back from our political ideologies and look at the facts.

We have to do something about fossil fuels, flat out. Some people say we have 50 years of gas, some 500, regardless it's a finite resource, now is a good a time as any to figure out a way to deal with it. With China and India working hard to beat us at our game, consumption wise, we don't have much time.

To the people on the Right- Drilling for more oil is not going to bring oil prices down. Besides the actual time to build facilities and actually pump it out of the ground (some estimates say it may be as long as 10 years), the actual eventual cost savings will only probably be a couple of cents a gallon. People on both sides don't realize how much oil is already being pumped out of the ground already and the vast amounts we already use. Which brings me to..
The people on the left- Bio-fuels are not the answer, especially Ethanol. Besides using more resources to produce than it creates, people like to eat corn. Even if this wasn't the case, if they used every kernel of corn for Ethanol, it would only account about 20 percent of our fuel consumption. We use a fuck-load of oil, folks.

So then what? We have a LOT of natural gas in this country, but we should still use this opportunity to develop more efficient forms of power. The problem is, right now it's nuclear. In fact, it's just about about perfect, if we could just figure out where to put the waste...