Something's been bothering me for about a decade, and irritating me for some years before then. Now, retired, I can speak freely. 

I charge:
  - my fellow citizens, who I spent 20 years defending, to consider the logic I lay out below, and inform their elected leaders about conclusions based off this logic and any subsequent research.

  - politicians, who I spent 20 years obeying, to find some speaking nuggets here.  I hope they do indeed take an overpowering stand for energy sense... there should be something good they can do with the logic below.

I'm one of the apparent 80% of Americans fed up with the status quo. And I indeed want 'change'.

But my part of the 80% is the kind opposed to change that goes further in the liberal-socialist direction.
  - I have lived in 9 states and in DC, spanning from the Potomac to the Pacific Coast, from Texas to Minnesota. I've traveled extensively in 30-some other states. I have a good random sampling of conditions across the USA. In the USA we can have smog-haze, in addition to normal meteorological 'inversion' conditions. But at it's worst, whether a natural inversion or man-made smog layer, I could always at least find a brighter spot in the sky, and know where the sun was. Very few days were 'at its worst'.
  - I also lived in the Far East for two years, and traveled among various countries in Europe, Central America, and the Middle East. I have seen pollution. I have seen Chinese & Korean pollution so thick that I couldn't find the sun on a cloudless day... too many days to count, in just two years. Never seen that pure-white sky anyplace in the USA. I've never gone jogging in the USA, and afterwards felt like I'd just smoked two packs of cigarettes. I've felt that in Korea.
- I'm 44 years old. I have a memory. I use my memory. I've sampled some 16,000 days thus far in my life; about 12,000 days since achieving an age of reason. That should be statistically significant for any eyewitness.
- I can verify that the USA has absolutely no pollution problem, especially compared to other countries; current USA environmental regulation is over-achieving.
- As a friend of many liberals, I know the most radical of the environmentalists are grinning with glee at high petroleum prices, and want those prices to keep going up. That's their part of the 80%, not my part.  Rather, I say we have absolutely no need for even more government restriction.

I dare to assess, with a memory of the days I've seen, that we even have some room to relax a bit.

I want government out of the way.
- I'm fed up with ever bigger government. I can balance my budget, but my state and my Fed cannot.
- I'm not affiliated with any oil company, but I know oil companies procure, process, and provide all manner of historically stupendously efficient petroleum energy. Government does not produce natural gas, gasoline, nor any other product. Yet I witnessed federal legislators assuming a self-declared righteous position, grilling oil executives. The congress members behaved as pathetic buffoons. I know well that oil companies make only 2/3rds the profits that government makes in taxing that hard work.

In general, I'm fed up with government that assumes an elitist air, and dares to challenge the hippie song: "He can't even run his own life, I'll be damned if he'll run mine!" Ironic. That song is now a legitimate charge against amok liberalism.

I'm part of that 80% that wants a government to stand up for common sense and logic, over emotive hype and half-baked half-truths. A few simple points suffice:
- We drilled & pipelined Prudhoe Bay with 1970s technology, and Alaska has not suffered. ANWR, with even 1990s technology, should be a no-brainer.  Same conclusion for offshore drilling, just like China is doing off our very shores just on the other side of our oceanic boundary with another country's territorial waters!
- And I cannot comprehend who could seriously push for petroleum-produced food to be converted, with more petroleum, into a petroleum substitute.
- Again, I have a memory. I know full well that Impending Ice Age was the scare a generation ago. I know full well that global warming began before mankind began the Industrial Revolution.

In the real world, cause must precede effect. Yet state & federal government actions regarding all the above, and energy policy generally, is not short of ludicrous. A link could be made to our founding documents:  "When in the course of human events ... " But at the least, a quote from the comedian Gallagher definitely applies to current government over-intervention in American liberties and the general welfare in pursuit of happiness. As Gallagher once said, ironically, about government-run schools: "It makes no sense!"

I want government to wake up to reality, to stand firm against environmentalists, against their wacky pseudo-science, and against various earmark and other end-around pressures. I want government to get out of the way of current-technology oil drilling, pipelining, shipping, refining, and distribution. I want, indeed: "drill here, drill now, pay less". That's the most sense I've heard from any politician in about a decade!

Stop the madness of 'cap & trade'. Cease the Warner-Lieberman style of idiocy, and all state-level equivalents.

In this essay, I've focused on petroleum. And it's for good reason:  petroleum has been to energy what penicillin was to medicine. But similar can (and should) be said about nuclear energy. One might also, after hearing what geologists like Apollo-17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt have to say, become a lot more serious and urgent about nuclear fusion, and moon-mining operations to get this wonderful fuel. But nuclear fusion is at least several years away; we don't even any more have hardware that can get man and mining to the moon. However, we do have nuclear fission, and all manner of petroleum-based energy, that are technologically mature & 'immediately' available.

Bottom line:
1. Government, in general, get out of the way!
2. Government, specifically, loosen the reigns on American energy!
3. Government, eliminate regulations & laws, now!