Isn't there some way to get a car/truck/plane to run on Krylon? Jeez.

Leaving aside the oil, nope on "if we started buying everyone else's food, we'd harm as many people here as would be helped by the lower prices." Look up the fraction of americans who work on farms, it's about 2-3%, much lower than the fraction of americans that buy and eat food. Before the 'green revolution' of industrial farming, it was about 1/3. For farms, not for eating

I would agree with you if there wasn't a huge support industry of people who store, distribute and sell those crops, as well as provide tractors, fertilizer, and irrigation, as well as trade commodities. But yes, on that very narrow view, you'd probably only leave 2-3% of America without jobs.

Even in ag support, it's surprisingly small now. And presumably we'd need folks to store distribute and sell all that imported stuff. I don't recommend it, but the pure job harm would be way smaller than when we basically scrapped our textile industry so folks could buy imported clothes.

What about employment assistance/ job-training programs? I don't like the idea of putting small farms out of business, but when US policies (as well as those of the Europeans and Japanese) are keeping other countries in poverty something needs to change. Not necessarily a big overhaul but maybe a gradual tweaking.

but there's not even any brown people to bomb in alaska.

As a biologist, seeing more oil development in Alaska is very disappointing. The largest untouched bioprovinces (holding wonderful acadamic value) that lie within the United States are in Alaska. Every little thing that we do in Alaska has great consequences - even putting a highway (or worse, pipeline) down the length of the state has, in effect, divided the landscape in two. I have a hard time talking dispassionately about widespread development that has such large impacts on the local biota.

Inuits, bitches! We are going to kill some Inuits!

The new Wired has an article on the future of energy and proposes a solution that none of us even brought up, incidentally - nuclear power. Now that the Chernobyl spector looms a little less ominously, several green heretics (a Greenpeace co-founder, the Gaia-theory guy, and a former trustee of Friends of the Earth) are jumping on board with the nuclear agenda. Despite the long decay time of nuclear waste, nuclear energy releases 100x less radioactive emissions than coal power. Also, the article mentions that the farmland required to replace oil with biofuels in the US would occupy the space 10x the size of Idaho (using conventional, not organic methods). Though nuclear energy wouldn't immediately replace oil, it would go a long way in supplanting coal and in turn reducing hydrocarbons. Also, nuclear reactions produce hydrogen more efficiently than any other renewable method, which could eventually be used to power cars.

Anyway, I just thought this was all interesting, given that we just had it out over this one. What do you guys think?

I like it.

Although I don't want to see more oil drilling, especially in ecologically sensitive areas, this proposed drilling isn't in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge that Bush fought hard to open for drilling. This is land designated as a National Petroleum Reserve in 1923. I don't know the details of how this area compares ecologically to ANWR or what drilling has already occured.