What's gasoline really worth? Should we be paying less than $4, or more? Other countries have been paying more for quite a while. It's not like we're generating more gasoline anywhere. It's a precious natural resource that we use to make polymers, medicines, and all sorts of useful things. We also burn it. Should we be paying such a low price for it? It's up around the cost of milk or orange juice, but we can get more milk any time. We can't get more gasoline. Mining the northern shore of Alaska will get us about 6 months more oil, they say. Is that really worth the trouble? What happens in 6 months, then? Will that be 6 more months of underfunded research into developing alternative energy? President Carter envisioned energy independence by the year 2000, then President Reagan scrapped Carter's energy policy to please big business. What would gas prices be like if we had been developing alternative energy strategies with full federal funding over the past 30 years? Would big business be suffering from neglect? Somehow, I think we would have managed to keep the economy going.
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