I think the question should be how long are we going to supply other countries with huge amounts of our money to supply us with energy?
It might
feel good for the US not to be buying oil from a particular country (or all of them), but they'll still be getting the same amount of money from others. Even if we could find alternatives rapidly (unlikely), the growing petroleum demands of China and India would more than make up for whatever we don't buy.
Just because the price for oil has taken a temporary dip expect prices to be back up to $4 a gallon very soon.
Agreed. But while we can get it cheap, we should.
Realize that for as long as we are developing and using alternative energy that costs more than oil, we are, in effect, subsidizing the energy costs of China, India, and others, and thereby:
1) Helping their industries to outcompete ours on the world market
2) Increasing pollution (since US users of oil burn it more cleanly than Chinese users of the stuff).
Maybe by developing the more expensive non-petroleum energy technologies we'll someday be at a competitive advantage vs these other nations (when oil prices go up far enough and fast enough). But folks have been chanting that mantra for 30 years, and if we'd made those investments back then they still wouldn't have paid offf and we'd be at an even greater disadvantage than we are today. It's counterintuitive, but
waiting do develop this stuff might be better for the US economy and for the environment than developing them now.
None of this applies to alternative energy development that can compete right now against oil (without govt subsidies, carbon offsets, or other mumbo-jumbo scale tipping). We should be developing these technologies, and private industry will certainly take the lead.