>>11
Coal can be made to substitute quite nicely for oil. Google for information about the Fischer-Tropsch process if you don't believe me. Coal-to-gasoline on a vast industrial scale is being done right now in South Africa and New Zealand, and the Germans did it during the Second World War.

For the cost of the war in Iraq we could have had dozens of coal-to-petroleum plants by now, and trillions of dollars that are currently being shoveled into the bank accounts of the House of Saud and other enemies of Western Civilization would remain right here in the US, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying unionized industrial jobs of a type it's been fashionable to say Americans don't want. As a bonus it would create them in the poorest and most disenfranchised parts of the US, places like West Virginia. Of course, the environmentalist wackos would object strenuously to any plan that doesn't come down to our grandchildren hunting rats by candlelight.

Dubya has just enough political backbone to buck the people P. J. O'Rourke calls "the peace creeps," but not quite enough to go up against Greenpeace. More's the pity.