Please, 5 yrs from now, gas hits $4/gallon again, drilling will be back. Your wet dreams of a bike riding utopia are just that.

"why the fuck aren't we off fossil fuels as countless politicians have promised."

Maybe because that's impossible.

fivethirtyeight.com looked at this exact issue a couple days ago and it's worth a read. In the column, ("Don't Take Polling Literally, Part #39916") Sr. Silver addresses why 21% of people -- in a PPP poll -- answered they were MORE LIKELY to support further drilling because of the spill in the gulf. Basically, he says pollsters shouldn't offer illogical responses, because sometimes people are going to pick them; perhaps people will assume the offered responses are logical because, well, the pollster offered them...and people will select those responses because they're trying to be consistent with earlier questions. Specifically, the pollster had just asked the responders "Do you support drilling", so when this illogical question/response was then offered, people didn't want to sound inconsistent. Silly pollsters. Silly responders. Silly results.

"So long as Americans do not reduce their consumption of oil, refusing to drill at home means importing more of the stuff, often from places with looser environmental standards. The net effect is likely to be more pollution, not less. Nigeria, for example, has had a major oil spill every year since 1969, observes Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation, a think-tank. Putting a price on carbon would eventually spur the development of cleaner fuels, and persuade Americans to switch to them."

http://www.economist.com/world/united-st…