"I like VDH, but one of his problems is that he never identifies the fundamental problem: Islam."
I think he does. His approach is to strip Islamic areas of their influence on the rest of us through their oil, and to prevent them from getting nukes by any means necessary. After we accomplish that, there will still be Muslim areas, but they will be a culture apart, powerless to hurt us, and free to stew in their juices until they undergo some sort of Reformation and agree to tolerate non-Muslims.
The immediate answers to dependency on Mideast Oil, at least for the U.S. is coal and nuclear power. I use about 600 gallons of gas a year, but over 1200 gallons of heating oil. We will need liquid fuels for transportation for the foreseeable future and could derive a lot of domestic supply from coal gassification and (maybe) shale oil. If we could get the price of electricity down (or the price of oil up) enough, I would convert to electric heat, saving 2/3 of my personal petroleum use (ignoring my proportional share of trucking, airplane, and rail fuel use). I hear the idea of cutting back on foreign oil dismissed as sure to produce an instant depression, but I'm not so sure. Still in a depression, we spent like never before at the start of WW II because we thought our lives were at stake, and instead of a worse depression, we got the greatest boom in history. If our lives are really at stake again and we spend what's necessary to move toward energy independence, maybe it'll be good for the economy again like it was that time, but even if not, if we accept that we are in mortal danger we should try for it.
I agree. The problem is that every time the US tries to do something like that (a massive gassification project, shale oil, even drilling where we know we have the good old fashioned type of oil - Florida Gulf Coast, for example) the leftist nuts run out and stop it.
What is it going to take for us to be serious about this and really do it? Many of our current problems could have been prevented had we done this years ago.