During the last eight years the federal government has fostered solar and wind clean energy development.
During that time fossil fueled electrical energy plants, needed to fill in when sun/wind/water are not producing, have been cleaned up much like gasoline auto emissions. California converted all oil burning electrical plants to natural gas, which is cleaner.
But they created unforeseen problems because the changeover to natural gas was so fast that natural gas costs nearly doubled, causing the new electric plants to go bankrupt; all is well now as the demand for natural gas eventually created a cheap supply.
One of the ways that the feds justified clean energy devices was to disallow oil drilling on federal oil reserves.
This action forced the importation of foreign oil from Mexico, Canada and the Middle East at ever increasing cost. Mexico and Canada prospered and we know what happened in the Middle East — they went crazy with our money, propagated and started killing each other and involving us and the EU.
But our local entrepreneurs started drilling on private lands and developed fracking to recover oil on otherwise depleted lands; this cost more but with high import prices it worked. Once the local production started to reduce the imports it was the Middle East that felt the lost income first.
They responded with radically reduced prices to force us out of business but it was too late; the expensive part of drilling was done and the cheaper pumping cost could still continue even if at a temporary loss.
Crude oil went from $120/barrel to $30 over the past two years but is now up over $50/barrel due to our oil companies’ action in spite of the feds obvious price manipulation. Our local crude oil producers survived and they are providing more of the energy we use, thus keeping jobs here and improving our economy.

The economies of the Middle East are melting down and it can be predicted that without our oil money they will be less able to buy weapons, fight among themselves and terrorize the world.
Not to worry; first, contrary to the fed stats, we have a 100 year reserve of fossil fuels; second, we have proven engineering to minimize pollution and third, green energy will by definition eventually be as efficient as fossil fuels.
It will take many years to develop new green energy cars, rail systems and power plants to replace existing worldwide fossil fueled equipment. No one talks about added dams for hydro power but that is also necessary; nor adding/rebuilding nuclear power plants — nuclear power is clean but the plant is best located in a remote location with a place to bury the expended fuel waste.
Seems to me that the do-gooder greenies in control of the feds may have unwittingly created imported oil problems to promote solar and wind by driving up oil prices but our oil companies, seeking a profit, have solved it.
Our outgoing president recently reaffirmed no drilling on federal lands and no pipelines but hopefully the president-elect will see the benefit to our infrastructure and economy to at least open some lands in remote areas of Alaska.
The feds need to stop taxing our utilities to subsidize green energy and focus on the reality that manufacture and installation of green energy equipment uses more fossil fuel than it will ever generate.
We need green energy but we need to be patient; in the meanwhile engineering has improved gasoline powered auto mileage from 10 to 50 gph and we can do better!

George Loegering