Open? We absolutely HAVE to do this, period. Oil and other fossil fuels are finite resources, period.

“The U.S. is actually less dependent on Middle East producers for imported oil than the major oil-consuming economies of Europe and Japan. Among the major suppliers of imported oil to the U.S. are the Western Hemisphere producers of Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. Nigeria and Angola are also major suppliers. In 2007, the Persian Gulf supplied about 21 percent of total U.S. oil imports, of which about three-quarters came from Saudi Arabia, while some came from Iraq and a small amount from Kuwait.”

Well, we also consume more oil than any other country in the world (actually, we consume more oil than Japan and most of Europe *combined*), and our prodcution of oil has been outpaced by our oil imports since the early 1990s (we also import slightly less oil than Japan and most of Europe combined). Venezula isn’t exactly friendly to the Bush Regime these days BTW, and Nigeria, Angola, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait are all members of OPEC (and none are friendly to the USA besides the last two), which controls about half of U.S. imported oil. The amount of oil that we import from the Persian Gulf region was 17.1% in 2006.

Fuel economy standards have been basically stagnant for decades until very recently due to undue pressure from the oil and auto industry. Alternative fuel use has also been surpressed by the same two entities. Who killed the electric car? The same two entities along with others. There have been plenty of ways out of the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into, but we’ve been listening to the wrong people for waaaay too long IMO.