Originally posted on June 27, 2008.  This is my fourth revision.

Here’s my plan:

1. Sell 1% of the SPR, per month, until oil is < $100 barrel again.  
2. Spend the SPR money, about $1 billion / month, to jump-start alternatives like Picken’s wind project, solar and hydro. 
3. Make a 9pm EST Primetime announcement that the U.S. will begin drilling in the OCS and ANWR effective immediately.  Make it a national priority to help oil companies get rigs out to those sites!  Use military when necessary, interrupt shipping lanes - rally the nation - this is important & urgent!  Let's act like it!
4. Offer $100 billion for the first person or company to invent an inexpensive  way to retrofit existing cars to get > 100 mpg.  It’s great if auto makers offer new cars that get high mpg but for every new car sold there are thousands already on the road. 
5. Build the largest nuke plant in the world in the Nevada desert, right next to the Yucca Mountain Repository, and plug into the national grid.  Why risk transporting the nuke waste any farther than necessary?
6. Identify the 10 worst users of energy, efficiency-wise, make them famous and use carrots and sticks to make sure the list is completely different next year.
7. Abandon all efforts at biofuels - that was a really stupid idea.  Not only is producing food energy-intensive but we need all the food we produce to feed people, not cars.  USE FOOD FOR PEOPLE.
8. Remove regulatory burdens preventing new oil & gas refineries from being built and existing ones from being expanded. 

So why do we need an energy plan?  Is there a crisis?  Some prominent Democratic leaders, including Barack Obama, would like you to believe high energy prices are punishment for 5% of the world’s population using 25% of the world’s oil or bitter medicine necessary to force us to finally do the right thing:  conserve. 

This explains their lack of action. 

Others, including myself, have a different take on things:

America does great things with the energy it consumes!

The U.S. economy produces over $13 trillion of goods and services  - more than Japan, Germany, China & the U.K. combined!  We create most of the world’s great inventions.  We produce most of the world’s food - food is energy-intensive.  We use lots of energy to help maintain a fantastic military that helps keep the world safe.  Our incredible economy creates lots of wealth, a big chunk of which is donated to help feed and clothe the rest of the world. 

We also produce most of the world’s medicines, music, movies and manufactured goods.  Does that surprise you?  You may have been misled into thinking the U.S. has lost all it’s manufacturing to China.  Actually, in real dollars, American manufacturers produced $1.53 trillion worth of goods in 2005—up from $900 billion in 1992.  Let me repeat, we manufacture 70% more goods than we did in 1992 in real dollars - that takes energy, lots of it. 

So, why shouldn’t we use the most energy?   We create the most goods and services (and inventions, music, film, food, medicines, aircraft, etc..)  In addition, we’re extremely efficient using our energy.  In 1999, we were able to produce all the goods we did in 1972, and then some, with 74% less energy.  In other words, Mr. Obama, we already conserve, have been for years, we just call it being “efficient”, and we do it to save our companies, and families, money. 

We should celebrate our economy and what we produce, not feel guilty about much energy we use to produce it!

This plan has huge benefits for the United States:

1. Selling SPR oil and opening up the OCS and ANWR sends a huge message to world oil markets that the U.S. is finally serious about using all it’s available resources to meet it’s energy needs.  Although the OCS/ANWR oil will not be delivered immediately, speculators trade on trends and the trend for oil prices will finally start heading down. 
2. Exactly how much will prices drop?  Oddly enough, a Democrat in Congress may have answered that question.  Peter Welch (D-VT),  sponsored H.R. 6022 to stop adding oil to the SPR.  He says that, not purchasing 70,000 barrels per day, “may reduce gas prices 5 to 24 cents per gallon”.  Every Senate Democrat voted for it, including Obama and Hillary, and Bush signed it.  So, Democrats have agreed, on record, that 1) supply and demand affects gas prices (I had doubts Democrats believed the science of modern economics) and 2) exactly how much the price of gas drops (21 cents) for every 100,000 barrels of oil.  Remarkable!
3. Using Congressmen Welch’s math, just selling SPR oil should save another 49 cents / gal.  Do you know anyone that wants to save 49 cents a gallon?  I DO!!  As far as OCS/ANWR, we looked at the 2006 OCS Assessment and the 1987 ANWR report, which indicated, OCS/ANWR may yield 2 to 4 million barrels per day.  Again, using Rep. Welch’s math, the OCS/ANWR oil may push the price of gas to below $1 per gallon.   It may not be that dramatic but the more U.S. oil we produce, the lower the worldwide price - it’s economic science.   
4. This should drop not just the price of oil, but nearly all U.S. consumer items.  Lower prices and a solid plan should help calm consumer fears about the future of the U.S. economy.  Right now, the Democratic Congress stands in the way of a solid drilling plan and that stalemate’s making consumers very uncertain, and increasingly, more angry.  
5. The SPR has about 700 million barrels of oil so 1% is 7 million bbls.  At $142 per bbl, selling 7 million bbls from the SPR will produce about $1 billion dollars per month for investment in alternative energy .  Oil, gas, coal, natural gas and nuclear will meet our near term needs (next thirty years) while we transition to alternative energy (wind, solar, hydrogen, liquefied coal).
6. Aggressive domestic drilling replaces foreign oil with domestic and that prevents hundreds of billions of US dollars from going to countries hostile to our interests, lower our trade deficit,  and creates hundreds of thousands of US jobs.
7. The more oil produced in the U.S. the more control we have over how it is produced.  For example, U.S. deep sea drilling standards minimize damage to the environment if there’s an accident.  Right now, we have no control over how a well drilled off the coast of Nigeria is regulated.
8. Abandoning bio fuels will reduce pressure on food prices and help get food to those who need it most.
9. This plan generates billions of dollars for alternative energy research without any money from the federal budget - this helps keep our deficit down, interest rates down and the dollar up - all good for U.S. consumers.
10. One nice side benefit of increased domestic production is that all our allies, Europe, Japan, Australia, South America, Afghanistan, will also benefit from lower worldwide oil prices after we increase US output.  They will be grateful that we have finally taken pressure off not just gas price but prices overall and avoided a worldwide recession, if not depression.

Contrary to popular belief, a bad economy can be an advantage for Senator McCain - it depends on how he handles it.  Just because the GOP has the White House during an economic downturn, doesn't necessarily mean the country will replace them with Democrats. 

Three things can happen after November - economy gets better, stays the same, or gets worse.  Putting Dems in the White House could make the economy worse - in fact, if history is any guide - that's likely.    Since McCain is a self-described economic light weight - he needs some help.

Here are three steps to help McCain address the economy - the number one issue for most Americans:

1) Announce (early) Mitt Romney will be his Vice-President.  Romney is a private sector superstar that fills a huge gap in McCain's otherwise strong resume. Romney's excellent at promoting free market solutions to effectively counter the populist rhetoric of Obama/Clinton.   He’s also great at explaining why doing nothing (letting markets sort things out) is usually best.  Make no mistake, both Democrats seek to turn this country left and back to the bad old days of socialism and progressivism.  We need a strong defender of capitalism on the ticket - nobody better than Mitt Romney.

2) Working with Romney, McCain should draft a major economy speech that educates voters about the successes of capitalism and how markets work best unfettered. For example, he can highlight how many hundreds of millions of people from India and China have moved from poverty to middle class and how that helps our economy (exports). He could talk about how liberal government policies and unions have crippled Detroit and Michigan hinting if you want America to follow the same course - elect Obama/Clinton. 

3) The knockout blow would be to debunk the myth that America can trust Democrats with the economy because of the great Clinton economy of the 1990s. The fact is the booming economy of the 1990s began with a recovery in March 1991 - 20 months before Clinton took office in January 1993. (See the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis @ bea.gov).   In addition, the Clinton budget surpluses that Hillary's so proud of were a direct result of the fiscal discipline of the historic 1994 Republicans and their Contract with America. 

McCain should help Americans understand that an Obama-Clinton economy would look more like Jimmy Carter’s economy than Bill Clinton's economy. In 1976, like 2008, a Democrat became President (Carter) with a struggling economy and a Democratic Congress. That combination (Dem President & Dem Congress) made a bad situation worse.

Do we want to repeat history and be worse off in four years? 

Now that's some straight talk!