Marsha, I can't tell if you are missing the point, or purposely muddling it...

The price of fuel is what will drive consumption, no doubt. As the price increases, people will have to decided if it is worth it to them to buy fuel or not, or how much fuel they will buy, or how far they'll be willing to drive to work, etc.

The price of fuel, however, can be changed in many ways...two of the possible ways are increased fuel taxes sending billions of dollars to government research into alternative fuel technology, or in collusive and outright deceitful practices sending billions of dollars to offshore accounts and the treasure chests of big oil executives, who not only have no motivation to end our dependence on oil, but have the exact opposite motivation, to keep us hooked and using.

The biggest problem for us Americans with this, of course, is not only the money being generated in part through non-market forces, and that they are outright lying to you about it, but that Bush and his cronies are lying to us about it, too.

Just yesterday Bush made a big deal about ending the moratorium on new offshore drilling leases....while there are 68,000 acres of existing offshore drilling leases that the oil industry is purposely not drilling on RIGHT NOW.

Privileges granted to industries like Big Oil to extract a public resource from public lands for private profit who choose to not do so in order to artificially manipulate the market for that resource ought to have the privilege revoked and handed out to another who will use the privilege to benefit both themselves and the public.

Use it or lose it...those leases are given out so that oil companies can make a profit while providing the public with a necessary resource...they are not handed out to be used as pawn pieces to manipulate the not-free-at-all-market of gasoline and oil.

Bush lying to us about it...as usual...only makes it worse.

Fish on...

Todd