I have to agree with Carzin here as much as I hate government subsidies. I am an oil field worker so when yall refer to the oil companies as the evil enemy who wants to see the price go ski high does that lump me in there? I know that since the price was 35/barrel in Jan of 2009 to the price being in excess of 100/barrel my pay has not really varied much but I have to pay 3.89/gallon for gas just like everyone else.

We need to research alternatives but we need to make sure the ones we invest in are viable options. LNG or CNG is extremely abundant here stateside but like Carzin said there has been a large uprising against fracking and if fracking were ever regulated to extinction then our vast reserves of recoverable natural gas would not be so vast anymore. We need electric cars, hybrid cars, CNG/LNG cars, as well as gas and diesel cars. It is a combination of all of these things that is going to fuel our future and we will not be able to rely on just one to meet our needs.

But just like oil, we can't develop a dependency on coal for our power plants, especially once the energy demand rises due to plug in cars being charged all the time. The only way to really meet that need is with nuclear and after the disaster in Japan it is hard to see much of a future there.

Before anyone blames the price of oil on the oil companies you need to look at who our country put in the White house, a man who has openly stated that he wants to find a way to bring gasoline prices in the US up to the amount in Europe. This will help further his agenda as well as limit the travel of citizens and their freedoms. While it is easy to blame the people getting "rich" off oil we need to take a serious look at our policy makers and what their motives are.

As I type this I am floating 50 miles south of New Orleans, LA on a brand new deep water drilling rig called the Noble Jim Day. We are currently contracted to Shell to batch set 6 new wells in the gulf but we are waiting on a permit to get to work. Since the moratorium on offshore drilling the permit process has been painfully slow. Shell is forking out hundreds of thousands of dollars a day for this rig to sit here, waiting on the government so we can drill more wells and increase our domestic supply. If the government would let us drill than can use the tax and permit revenues from the oil companies to pay for the alternative subsidies.