what a dick! this dude gets away with everything!

Because we have criminal and incompetent politicians busy with their war mongering. The nerve of them to actually look at the issues.

'Cause we don't want to catch up to Japan or Switzerland on this.

According to a report on MSNBC earlier, any oil collected from off-shore drilling won't even be available to the public until close to the year 2020. What's the point...besides political posturing, I mean?

He's still got some oil buddies left who aren't multi-billionaires yet. :p

I hate this administration.

Dubyahs final daze...clueless to the very end.

Soon the second banana will fill in and the Dubyah Reich will cease. I plan to party large on that day.

I totally agree with investing in alternate energy sources/ getting the hell away from suburban sprawl as the best answer... But I don't get comments like this:

"while the oil companies continue to gouge the American people for massive profits."

If you don't want oil drilled domestically, that's fine. Or not that's fine. But you have to pick a side. You can't complain about high gas prices and then complain when the govt starts drilling domestically.

"The way the markets work, until there is chaos will there be any concerted effort in trying to do anything meaningfully helpful. It's a sad reality."

I also agree with this, or at least the way I'm interpreting it. People aren't going to move away from fossil fuels if they are cheap - they'll buy Escalades. It's going to be painful for a lot of people adjusting (some deserved and some not) but w/o the pain people would just keep on driving 15mpg cars, building out exurbia, neglecting mass transit, etc.

So what? Nobody wants it, nobody would approve it, and no product could possibly enter the pipelines in under 6 years. This is Bush throwing out a non-sequitur so he can say he's "doing something" about the high cost of oil. Meanwhile, his buddies at ExxonMobil, Haliburton, Kinder Morgan, and the like are falling over themselves pouring their largesse into what will be the most quiet, vacant, and avoided presidential library ever. Bush Legacy? Find it in any dumpster...or sewer, if you're in San Francisco.

There is no oil crisis. Those fkers, exxon, mobil, etc. own the fields, the ships, the refineries, the pipelines, etc, etc. They control it all. They use foreign banks and dummy corporate structures to get around the laws and regulations. Even the Saudis are just pawns in the game. Wake up.

one small step for a chimp, one giant leap for douchebags everywhere.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was not meant to control fuel prices. It is an emergency supply of oil in case of a massive disruption in supply and any attempt to draw from its wells just to knock a couple pennies off the price of oil would be unwise.

It was just a matter of time before the executive order was rescinded, and Congress will follow through with lifting the Legislative ban as well. This is where we start to destroy the environment to squeeze the last few drops of oil out of the tank.

w's a drunken moron. we should be consuming less oil not drilling for more. this would increase supplies and bring the price at the pump down.

legislate that every car sold has to get 40mpg and have that increase regularly every year - until everyone is driving smaller, more efficent cars - that would be a real change - all these other measures are utter bs

This is the Enron presidency.

Yeah seriously, how has he not been assasinated? The state he is leaving this country in is a joke. This move is just political lip service since the oil will take 8-10 years to reach the market.

Assassinate Bush and he becomes an immortal presidential martyr, despite his sagging popularity. Don't even mention something like that.

Bah. This is a representative democracy and his actions mirror those of the dopes he governs....even the ones who didn't vote for him. Just stand outside and look at the types of cars driving by or at the mcmansions out in the burbs'. It's even worse out in the red states.

Complain about Exxon, Wallymart, Starbucks, et.al all you want, but the sheep can't fork over their bucks fast enough.

If as a collective, NY'ers had the balls to put their money where their mouths were, there would be a 4 dollar per gallon gas tax to directly feed public transit and pay down debt and eventually get guzzlers off the road.
You'd even do an end-run around the EPA roadblock Kalifornia is dealing with.

How do you think that would fly?

Nobody is "getting around regulations". Nobody is "price gouging". This is the free market, people. Oil is expensive because there's a limited amount and we use too much of it. Bush's stance, not surprisingly, is bass-ackwards, in that it entirely fails to address the need for conservation or alternative energy sources.

#34, oil was a commodity in high demand and getting increasingly scarce when it was trading at $60 a barrel. The only thing that's changed is that speculators who sell paper contracts to each other have driven up the price to ridiculous levels. This bubble's gonna blow and when that happens, we will really be faced with a conumdrum: do we stay committed to getting off the oil habit? Or go back to our old ways and enjoy $2.69 a gallon gas? This will really test our resolve.

^Nice. Anyway, the Chinese are scrambling for oil, but against huge disadvantages from their late entry into the global oil market. We sewed up huge reserves long ago (remember ARAMCO?) and were cruising along until the chinese outbid us on the slack in the market and things tightened after that (the chinese do have a lot of foreign account money to waive at everyone). What cracks me up is how Hu Jintao visited Venezuela and ceremoniously signed an idiotic deal for raising exports of oil to China from 2% of Venezuela's output to 5%. The rest is obviously going here.

Russia's oil wealth is bottlenecked by a lack of reliable pipelines to seaports and squabbles over rights of way. They're burning it up themselves at a fair pace and scrambling to fill chinese orders...at full price.

As to drilling in the U.S., Chevron sunk some exploratory wells in A.N.W.A.R. in the Eighties and filed the results away secretively. The scuttlebutt is that they were not impressed with the oil there and they haven't really pushed the matter like Republican pols. They do want at those offshore fields in Florida, but again, this is hurricane country and don't for a minute think that oil prices would be stable if drilling happened there.(Remember Hurricane Rita?)