Snowolf, I actually heard someone on TV make the same case as your first post...Bill O'Reilly of all people!!
I was blown away! He agreed that oil speculators were the reason for the high prices, not lack of supply. He said that oil companies already have leases on millions of acres of land that they are not drilling and they are just trying to use the current prices as a tool to accumulate even more. He mentioned that someone had proposed a law in which oil speculators would be forced to physically take posession of the barrels of oil they were bidding on, thereby forcing many of them out of the market. This law wouldn't really have much effect since the oil trade is heavily based in London but I was surprised to hear him support it anyways!
So I have a friend who is one of those "there is a conspiracy behind everything guys". He thinks the reason the government is blocking more drilling is not because they care about the environment, but because they have a "master plan" to let the middle east exhaust their supplies first then turn the tables on them 50 years down the road.
I know this will be an unpopular thing to say but I personally don't really have a problem with the price of gas. No one is going to invest the time & effort to convert to a more sustainable fuel until it is financially in their benefit to do so. If the price goes down people will just fire up the Hummers again, waste the resource, and then in the future we will have an even bigger crisis because there really will be a shortage of supply.
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