anonymous@22920 EVERYBODY needs oil not just the U.S., including left wing liberals and the rest of the world. You're right, cheap available energy is vital to mankind's standard of living. Look at how much energy it takes to melt steel so we can make durable goods, melt plastic, drive the injection machines, drive the heavy machinery, it never ends. It is involved in every stage of the economy. NOTHING will be as cheap and available as fossil fuels. When it starts to run out, people when then look back on our time as an incredibly age of abundance. Nuclear, solar, wind: they will never be as abundant as fossil fuels, and according to supply and demand, the price will be very high. Only critical applications will be fed. The big hope of course is Hydrogen power. Well you know what? Hydrogen is only a storage medium for energy. The energy must come from somewhere to create the hydrogen gas, it does not exist in that form naturally. This energy comes from powerplants fired by coal or oil/gas. Electric cars only force more coal powerplants to be built. Nuclear plants are now considered too risky and expensive to maintain, and the waste is so incredibly toxic nobody knows what to do with it. And IF the motivation for the Iraq invasion was oil, don't stoop so low as to believe that the US is somehow pumping it to Texas for free. It will be because the US and the rest of the world, cannot risk a madman having control of a vital resource, and being able to blackmail the Western world. The US would probably be very happy if a moderate government just sold it for fair market prices.