Boiling in oil...

According to the Times, oil briefly reached a high of $100 a barrel today. While it is true that $100 is "just" a number, it is also true that once it's crossed the price is unlikely to fall back to anything a consumer would reasonably want to deal with.

Energy is, and will get, more expensive.

And so far, no presidential candidate has taken a real aggressive approach to the problem. While they have all blustered to some extent, no one is really offering the hard facts, the inconvenient truths, if you will, that consumers are going to have to face.

There are a few ways out of the energy mess, a carbon tax being the one with the most immediate returns. But as yet no candidate has offered what I have always felt was the only real solution to the problem: a Manhattan Project-style coordinated effort to improve the efficiency of, among other things, car mileage, battery life, solar energy, wind energy, and yes, nuclear energy.

(It goes without saying, but bears repeating, that the money and human capital we have wasted in Iraq could easily have bought the country energy independence.)

Until we, as a society, and as voter/taxpayers, really attack this issue, results, well, there will be no results, and we will end up boiling, if not in oil, in the sun...

That is, if we're not brought to our knees by the countries we give our energy money to, enemies and allies both. Incidentally, I use the term allies here with some trepidation. The fact is that Saudi Arabia, which the government has called "friend" for the last 50 years or so, is NOT our friend. We share little with that country other than our need for oil and their willingness to sell it to us at market price, which price is determined, for the most part, by other players, those we call enemies.

It takes a certain amount of guts to stand, as Barack Obama did, before a group of automakers and promise that if you're elected as president, the automakers WILL raise the efficiency of their cars. He may have written off the votes of Detroit and even Michigan as a whole in that speech.

But it takes more guts, and more than guts, for a people to stand up before its government and say, we demand solutions and we demand them now, without kowtowing to special interests and erstwhile allies. We demand INDEPENDENCE!

It is the only solution for America, and the truth is, it's the only solution for the world. Whether the world's oil lasts another 5 years or another 50, we do know that it is running out and it is causing damage to the Earth.

The Earth and The People deserve better from the politicians running for president.