How to lose any competition

Play your weaknesses against the other guy's strengths.

Sometimes, if you're good enough all around, you can get away with that for awhile, but the longer you sustain pitting your weaknesses against the other guys strength, the more you're going to lose doing so.

Which brings us to economics.

Why in the world would we keep playing on an economic platform that is based in oil, when that's just not our strength? We are the worlds 3rd largest country, the 4th largest population (4.5%) and we have the worlds 12th largest oil reserves (1.6%) and the 6th largest gas reserves (3.2%)

If we were trying to sustain the 'average' lifestyle the rest of the world has, this would put us at a disadvantage. We're trying to sustain a better one than most of the world has, at the same time when a lot of other nations are trying to raise their lifestyle to match the standard we have set.

That means oil is becoming a losing proposition, and it's doing so at a pretty fast pace, and trying to maintain our lifestyle based on that oil is going to put us at a disadvantage.

If we play fair, and don't go to war, then we're going to spend a larger and larger percentage of our money to maintain our standard of living. I don't know how that's working for you, but I've been looking at last years heating bills, and my gs bills, and I can't afford it.

If we don't play fair and we go to war to protect our supply, then we have to pay to maintain large military forces in other countries. Taking Iraq as a thumbnail estimate, that costs us about $4,100 per household. Again, I don't know how that's working for you, but I can't afford it and I can't convince myself that the bill is never going to come do.

So, if we can't afford to buy oil, we can't afford to seize oil, and we don't have enough of our own oil to sustain our lifestyle, then it would appear that oil is not the answer.

So, any attempt to drill our way out of this with offshore drilling seems to me to be throwing good money after bad. Unfortunately, we don't have the time and money left to keep dicking around with this.

It's time to start pitting our strengths against the problem and start using our brains. Solar, wind, whatever it takes so that we can start selling energy rather than buying it.