Scott:

I am glad someone in the media has said what you just said. You hit the nail dead on when you declared:

"We just have to find the right combination and let the market, not the politicians, decide what’s best for America."

The politicos are not interested in dialog, rolling up their sleeves and working together. They are like spoiled braats who want what they want. Each side of the aisle. We need a balanced, common-sense solution..starting immediately. This includes short term solutions: drill for more oil and long term: Alternative energy technology that will carry us through this century into the next. (We have not drilled oil or built nuclear in at least a couple of decades.) No days off for Washington until they get this fixed! Is it small wonder why Congress has the lowest approval rating ever?!

There is also this error in thinking among the elected officials that they know best what we need. Some want to re-create or re-configure the market dynamics. Other than public safegards, Leave the market place alone! Recommended solution: Form a panel of the brightest minds in industry including energy experts to formulate a balanced approach to present to the nation and launch it ASAP.

Yes, we've had an energy crisis, probably back to the days of Jimmy Carter and his sweater-clad fireside chats. The source of inaction has not only been political, but also due to a misconception related to the scientific method of research. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no such thing as scientific certainty. Everything is always stated with some time of statistical confidence limit. Because of this, some think that there is no full agreement on climate change (global warming is a misnomer) or energy options, and think that therefore nothing should be done. We can't presume that we'll ever arrive at full agreement.

We all use a product regularly that allows for uncertainty. It's called insurance. We need to have some energy/climate 'insurance'.

I'm not sure if market forces can ever be counted on to be the best way to achieve something. There's always someone with a product/agenda that tries to color the debate in their favor (usually, financially).

Perhaps, we should use the method that seemed to produce the best consensus after the 9/11 attacks, and set up a non-partisan, all inclusive national comission to make recommendations. That group would need pre-authorization of it's results to avoid what usually happens - we're back to indecision on how to proceed, in a never-ending circle.

Either way, we should stop arguing over what to do and do something, before we reach a point where the repercussions are even greater than what we currently expect (resource wars?).

I'm sorry to hear that the author doesn't think much of Al Gore, and that he's not yet convinced about global warming. Gore was out front of the global warming issue well before it was popular, and now the vast majority of environmental scientists acknowledge that global warming is occurring and that human activity is at a minimum a major contributor. Those who have chosen not to see "An Inconvenient Truth" have chosen to bury their heads in the sand.

As far as allowing the markets to fix our reliance on foreign oil, isn't the free market pretty much to blame for it in the first place? Didn't we see this coming decades ago, but did nothing because it was left to free market approaches? The author refers to JFK's challenge of sending a man to the moon, but was it the free market that got us to the moon in less than ten years? The author is right about the need for real leadership, but I'm afraid that means leadership which embraces new thinking, not the failed approaches of the current leadership in Washington.