ORIGINAL: spaniel

While decreasing demand in the US may help for a few years, it will not stop the pain more than a few years. Anyone half familiar with what is going on in China and India knows that their increase in demand is soon going to outstrip any decrease in demand we can muster. Things are bad and, as long as we remain fully dependent upon oil, are only going to get worse.

While I think the oil companies share some blame and disapprove of many of their practices, in the end they are not fully responsible. As for record profits, if they make say 9% and demand in the US keeps going up, and price does, of course they will make higher profits as they are getting 9% of a larger sales number.

Talk about windfall taxes etc beg the issue... we are married to oil, and will remain in this position until things are bad enough that we finally do something about it. Extra taxes, taking profits back, etc won't solve the issue, which is that if China is going to suck up more and more oil we must move to something else as production is no longer increasing.

If a president wants to leave a legacy, they should develop a coherent strategy to encourage development of a new energy source (cellulose-based ethanol is a leader now) to uncouple the US from the global oil war.