Amidst the turmoil spreading across the Middle East, Americans are once again faced with a spike in oil and gas prices; and we are hearing the same old arguments about U.S. dependence on foreign oil and what we should do about it. Oil crises, however, haven’t been long lasting in the past. When gasoline prices have approached and exceeded Americans' threshold of pain—today that’s around $4.00 a gallon—calls to loosen restrictions on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) abound; but as soon gas prices drop back below that threshold, the clamor subsides. We’re on our way to $4.00-, perhaps $5.00-a-gallon gas. Will the powerful coalition of Democrats, environmentalists, and “green energy” advocates continue to prevent the exploitation of America’s oil reserves, or will they finally wise up?

Opponents of domestic drilling like to cite the March 24, 1989, Exxon Valdez spill that released several hundred thousand barrels of crude oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that resulted in 13 deaths and the release of nearly 5 million barrels of crude as reasons to restrict it. President Obama obviously agrees with them. His moratorium of offshore drilling in the Gulf, despite the ruling of a federal judge that it’s illegal, and the damage it’s doing to the U.S. economy, remains in effect.

It’s not simply this specter of disaster, however, that prevents federal and state governments from expanding domestic oil exploration and drilling to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It’s the fiction the green groupies perpetuate that the best and fastest way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil is to accelerate the development of hybrid, electric, and hydrogen fuel-cell automobiles. And that requires billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives and high gas prices to encourage Americans to buy them.

There is no hard data, however, to support the idea that this strategy would result in the rapid reduction in our dependence on foreign oil or the replacement of America’s gasoline-powered cars and trucks in anything short of several decades. Certainly, it slowly would chip away at it, but not fast enough in a situation of escalating gas prices to avoid damage to the U.S. economy. Nevertheless, that hasn’t prevented the green revolution advocates from a near-religious belief in it and a conspiratorial embrace of global warming and the need to regulate CO2 emissions as a weapon in their crusade.

It doesn’t take long to do the math, which they assiduously avoid, but it will take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment before today’s internal-combustion engines go the way of the Dodo bird. To be sure, fossil fuels are a limited resource and we should pursue alternative energy with all deliberate speed; but restricting the use of our national oil reserves while we do that, is pure folly.

The counterargument that cheap and plentiful oil only delays the development of alternative energy is a canard. If there’s a profit in it, you can be sure that automotive industries in the U.S. and around the world will pursue alternative energy vehicles with gusto. The technology just isn’t there yet, and it can’t mature as fast as some people would lead you to believe. Have you traded your gas guzzler in on a Chevy Volt yet?

The median age of automobiles in the U.S. has increased steadily since 1969 when it was 5.1 years. By 2007 the increasing cost of new cars drove the overall median age for automobiles to 9.2 years. Even if the world’s automakers were rolling electric or hydrogen-fuel-cell automobiles off their assembly lines at the rate they are producing gasoline-powered cars today, and they weren’t significantly more expensive, it would take more than 20 years to replace cars with internal-combustion engines, not to mention the infrastructure that supports them or where the energy for all that additional electricity will come from.

Electrical power generation is an equally difficult problem. We aren’t building the necessary nuclear power plants. Solar panels are expensive and remain highly inefficient at converting sunlight to electricity, which is why you don’t see them on everyone’s roof when you drive down the street. We’d have to cover the Mojave Desert with them just to light up California and charge their electric cars if they had them.

Wind farms are a great idea, except for the fact that they too are expensive, take up a lot of space and only work in places where it’s routinely windy. I have yet to find a study on how many windmills would be required to light up New York City and charge all their electric cars.

In the mean time, the oil crisis we are on the cusp of may be the one that drives gas prices well over $5.00 per gallon and keeps them there indefinitely. Our British friends now pay $9.00 per gallon. As popular uprisings spread from Libya to Iran, the political map of the region and the politics of oil are bound to change. Hopefully, we’ll have time for politicians who oppose more domestic drilling to see the error of their ways and do something about it; but we can’t rely on oil-rich Islamic countries to remain the reliable sources of oil they have been for the past several decades.

I’m sure we’d all love to have a car in our garage with a solar panel in its roof that we could drive indefinitely without ever stopping at a gas station. That day will inevitably come; but not soon. What we need in the meantime is a new energy policy that allows for the robust exploitation of our domestic oil reserves as we seek the technologies that ultimately must replace them. Hopefully, we will wise up and begin drilling before it’s too late.