I won't opine on whether we have enough oil reserves to last 200 years. I don't know one way or the other about that. But I do agree with you that this country needs our elected leaders to formulate a long-term, overarching energy policy designed to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and over time reduce our consumption of oil, period.

What our government is doing is encouraging the absolutely wrong behavior by both consumers as well as the U.S. oil companies. In another post here, I explained how the money we're spending on military actions to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East costs U.S. taxpayers about $2.00 a gallon. Said another way, our government is subsidizing the continued use of gasoline by essentially interfering with the free market's ability to properly price oil.

Through thru military force we've been able to keep the oil from the Middle East flowing. As the result, there is little economic incentive on the part of the U.S. oil companies to extend the effort and spend the money to actually explore and drill and pump it from U.S. reserves. It's a whole lot easier and more profitable for them to simply buy oil from Saudi Arabia, have it refined offshore in places like Aruba, then bring it here and sell it in gas stations. Why should they incur the additional cost to actually drill and pump it from our own reserves, when as much oil as they need is available from tankers coming from the Middle East? And our government is making sure that continues to happen.

So going back to Richie's original criticism of the electric car rebate program, I still think the idea of using government money to influence the behavior of consumers and private sector companies is a good thing. The problem is they way we have been spending U.S. taxpayer's money--hundreds of billions for the military to run around the Middle East with little recognizable purpose other than to "maintain regional stability" to assure that the oil keeps flowing thru the Suez Canal and ultimately into our gas tanks--is government intervention in the free market that is a whole lot more offensive than a piddly rebate program.

Like a lot of things, our government has this all bass-ackwards, just like a lot of things they do.