The answer isn’t oil, either

Retired petroleum engineer Michael Kasnick (“The answer isn’t ethanol,” April 5) seems to think the best way to address possible gas shortages is to provide more sweetheart deals to the oil companies, what he calls “increase[d] access to our domestic oil and gas resources.” Since oil companies are free to drill on private land at any time, he can only be referring to lands owned by the public. Perhaps he missed the December 2006 report from our own Interior Department — withheld for more than a year — showing that:

Or perhaps he is upset with the new Congress as it works to rescind billions of dollars in tax breaks and royalty waivers for a petroleum industry that is logging record profits.

The true price of oil is much higher than what we pay at the pump. The protection of foreign oil sources costs much more than money, and it is exceedingly unlikely that we have enough petroleum reserves in the United States to become anything near energy-independent using oil. Most experts believe that we will reach “peak oil” — the time when more than half of all the oil in the world has been used — within the next decade or two.

The Roanoke Times (Virginia)