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The Arctic may hold 90 billion barrels of oil, more than all the known reserves of Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Mexico combined, and enough to supply U.S. demand for 12 years, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Advocates claim that ethanol mandates and subsidies protect our planet, enhance U.S. security, and ease our pain at the pump. In fact, ethanol policy hurts all Americans except for the tiny slice of the population that grows corn or distills it into ethanol.

Environmental groups have railed for years against President Bush and the Republican Congress, calling on them to resist drilling the nation’s public lands.

Oil prices could hit $300 a barrel if the United States does not take drastic action to reduce its heavy dependence on foreign oil, but neither of the top presidential candidates is addressing the crisis, Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens said Monday.

Bush administration officials agreed that greenhouse gases could endanger the public and should be regulated under clean-air laws, but later reversed course amid opposition from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the oil industry, a congressional report said.

As the price of oil and natural gas soars, many customers are looking to coal as an alternative fuel. That means a boon for suppliers — and a potential bane for the environment.

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Economist friend Dr. David Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute based at Suffolk University in Boston, had this to say yesterday in response to Al Gore's speech on going 100-percent to renewable sources for energy generation:

"Al Gore wants to be Rachel Carson but has revealed himself to be Carrie Nation. He talks about protecting the environment, when all the while he really just wants to banish fossil fuels from the marketplace.

"There is no better example of his prohibitionist mentality than his recent demand that the United States produce 100 percent of its electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources in 10 years. Only about 30 percent of our electricity currently comes from these sources. The question is what will happen to the fossil fuels that are used to make the remaining 70 percent, once those fuels are no longer used to produce electricity. The answer is that they will find their way to the market place to be used, as they are now, to produce energy, whether in the United States or abroad.

"A “strategic initiative” that is aimed at substituting alternative fuels for fossil fuels in the production of one kind of energy is doomed to failure unless it somehow eliminates the value of using the same fossil fuels to produce other kinds of energy. If Mr. Gore really wants to spur the United States and other countries to use alternative fuels to produce electricity or any kind of energy, he should just sponsor legislation to prohibit the use of fossil fuels. Otherwise, he is just blowing smoke."

Beacon Hill has weighed in on the absurd economic claims promoted by various state climate commissions.

The nation's frantic search for crude-oil sources is leading to one of the oldest, richest and most-elusive prizes in the petroleum industry: oil shale.

Now that an executive-branch ban on offshore oil exploration has been lifted, the time has come for Democrats in Washington to lift their own ban on increased domestic supply. Americans are demanding that Congress do something about record-high gas prices. They recognize that prices will not go down unless supplies go up. And they also know that the only thing now standing in the way of more domestic supply is the Democratic refusal to allow it.