OK, I'm not going to respond point for point only because, darn it, it means way way too many boxes, OK?
We actually agree on some points (China, GWB).
But you are making a number of completely unsupportable assumptions.
1) That OPEC is losing the power to flood the market. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. The problem with OPEC is that it a combination of two things, evil and greed. I think the main 'governments' that produce most of the oil - a collection of Western hating, pro-terrorist 'princes' who rule with absolute authority and treat their women worse than dogs - are simply evil. Unfortunately, a number of other oil producing nations who are more or less decent - Canada, Mexico, Norway, Britain, Venezuela, Alaska (
) go along for the ride and are happy to jack up prices whenever requested to make a few extra bucks; that's the greed part. But - and here's the important thing to remember - Saudi Arabia alone sits on at least one-fourth of the world's known oil reserves (the Ghawar fields); add in the rest of the Middle Eastern market (Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq) and you can control the market. And they do.
In fact, the truth is that OPEC is becoming MORE powerful not less, because there are two sides to the equation, not one.
On the one hand, they control a large percentage of the supply which gives them great power.
On the other hand, india and China's rapid industrialization means that America no longer is the central focus of the other part... the demand. Instead of being the One Big Client (which confers a lot of power) we are now merely one in a growing number of clients begging for oil... and having to offer better prices in order to get it.
2) You make the entirely unsupportable claim that we are capable of producing enough oil for our own needs. Not true; there is not a single area - not ANWAR, not offshore - that currently has enough known reserves to do this. And they've been doing exploratory drilling on the North American continent for 90 years now, so there is very little that hasn't been tested. In fact most experts agree that ANWAR and offshore drilling - if fully exploited - will only offer a small percentage of the oil we consume on a daily basis. And this doesn't even cover the fact that wherever we drill, it's going to be EXPENSIVE, which means OPEC, by turning on the pumps a little harder at their easily accessible oil fields and feeding the pipelines that were built back in the 50's and are all paid off - can use their cheap oil to make the math impossible to work.
(Of course, we can make it work with enough gummint subsidies, but I'm figuring you don't support that, it isn't 'market forces')
Lastly, ANWAR holds perhaps 10% of America's oil consumption. By expanding now, we can bring that ten percent online by
2030... and guess what; by then Prudhoe Bay will be exploited; so that instead of gaining ten percent, at best we will probably LOSE a couple of percent.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that renewables, not fossil fuels, are the key...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against more drilling. Hell, my folks get a check for a few cents whenever oil goes up, from quaternary production in Waggoner, OK; an old farm my grandad had.
It just won't be enough.
Now, if we went on a massive program of increasing our efficiency, we could actually decrease our need fairly rapidly to the point that current production would be sufficient... it is, as has often been stated, comparable to the Manhattan project, a vast investment... but the returns would be worthwhile.
We CAN produce Hummers that get 35 mpg.
But market forces won't do it.
WE CAN solve this problem; but not by letting OPEC tell us what to do.
And just drilling WON'T solve it sorry.
Coal gasification projects have been about as successful as ethanol, which is to say they are billion dollar boondoggles giving money to the poor pitiful coal industry to spend on skyboxes and getaways, with no actual end product in sight that isn't worse, in terms of cash investment vs return, than ANY alternative energy system out there, including wind, solar or hey probably capturing cow farts.
Here's something to think on...
Right now, TEP (Tucson Electric Power) pays real dollars to me if I install photovoltaics, or gives me rebates if I insulate or apply some other energy saving technology to my house which results in lower electric bills.
Why do they do something so crazy as to pay me to reduce the money I send to them each month? Because it has long been known that it is actually much cheaper and much easier to apply known techological efficiencies to the issue of supply and demand than it is to build new power plants. TEP gets a much bigger bang for their buck by having me install a water heater jacket than they do by building another five billion dollar coal plant.
THIS is the solution.
80 mpg small cars, and 45 mpg big cars. Ultra-efficient energy use at home and during the commute.
I've reduced my energy consumption (both in terms of commuting and in household use) by 50 percent by some very easy steps. We installed energy efficient lighting, turn ALL our electric devices (including modems and switches and hubs and those kind of things) off at night; we installed motion and time sensor switches; we cut our water use by installing foot operated sink valves; we stopped using the dryer; we harvest our water instead of sending it to the sewer. We bought LCD monitors and we got really good at turning things OFF. Result... major decrease in electric, gas and water utility bils.
For the commute; we bicycle four or five days a week instead of driving; and I use the RE for groceries, not the car. Those military panniers are handy.
This isn't difficult. And supported by an intelligent national energy policy (as opposed to the secret one sold to US oil interests in 2000 by Dick Cheney) we can actually make this LESS expensive for the average worker, rather than MORE expensive.
But drilling alone won't answer. Market forces favor the people who own the market... keep giving your money to the Saudi princes so they can buy white women as slaves and support terrorists... I'm done with that.
My bicycle operates on foot power. My RE on biodiesel made locally. My next investment will be a clean burning ultra efficient diesel car (maybe an old jetta) converted to run on biodiesel. Lastly, enough photovoltaics so i'm a net zero on the grid... putting back out as much as I use.
I'm happy to talk about all these issues, but we need to be DOING things too.
And 'freeing up market forces' won't fix it. No matter how many holes you put in the ground.
You know, the problem is that 'market forces' are dumb. I mean, way down, back-holler sister-kissing STUPID. Market forces react not to what will happen tomorrow (despite the fact that we can see it coming) but ONLY to what happenned YESTERDAY.
If market forces were smart, the railroad barons would have bought the road infrastructure, and the road barons the airports... and so on... doesn't happen. They peak, and fail, and a new entrepreneur and a new paradigm moves in.
If market forces really worked, then by default, GM would have had the Chevy Volt on sale in 2003, with an ad campaign all ready for those high gas prices in 2004 and 2005,. Why didn't they? Because market forces say "hey, we make money selling big pickups, lets sell more of them"... until the day that the market crashes and then they say "Boy do we have a lot of big pickups... hey, what went wrong, dude? Guess it's time for the big TruckTober Sellathon again!".
That's ALL market forces do.
It takes intelligent human beings working outside pure 'market forces' to solve these problems; because market forces don't know how.
The answer is here. Renewables and alternative energy and increased efficiency. We just need to get cracking.
Oh, yea... I should add since you brought it up, Obama isn't worse, he is MUCH MUCH better. The dollars are scary, i'd agree; but that is largely because of the mess inherited from GWB, the economic collapse CREATED by GWB which is drying up tax revenues and making the projections worse... and lastly, because he is actually being honest with his budget.. he is no longer hiding all the war spending in other budgets... shocking.
Did I forget to mention we don't torture anymore, and we're not likely to go to war just because it looks like it might be fun? That's a good thing, too.