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http://www.anwr.org/

OK, this is for the retard who modded me troll. According to ANWR the reserves are between 6 and 16 billion barrels (recoverable). And from the CIA FactBook the USA used 20.68 million barrels a day in 2007. Generous estimates 16B/20M ~= 800 days. Worst estimate, 6B/24M (2010 estimate) ~= 250 days. So, under a year to under 3 years. Definitely not 20 years reserves.

Sure we may need better fuels then oil however here in the US we have massive reserves of it in Alaska where we cannot drill for oil there.

seriously i would hate to live there.

Or... we could listen in on 1-900-hot-sexx calls, take peoples' fingernail clippers away, dick around in totally unrelated countries, and continue to make sure that we hand over as much cash as possible to terrorist supporters in saudi arabia in the form of imported oil.

I'd rather do nothing. If nothing else, it's cheaper. Otherwise, how about some stuff that makes sense?

- Armed air marshals on flights. Failing that, issue every able-bodied man a machete, and assume that the good guys will outnumber the bad. Or hell, let's just coast on the knowledge that you can't even set fire to your shoe during a flight anymore without it turning into an audience participation event. That'll probably last a few years... longer if Bush keeps everyone on high-alert with the fear engine.
- An intelligence community that has the ability and power to convince friendly interests to help us. Bonus points if it actually obeys the law and properly notifies Congress of its activities within the timeframe allotted by the law. If several weeks after a wiretap is not enough time to find paper and pen and write a report about it, then ask Congress to change it.
- Energy policy that at least pretends that it's weaning us off foreign oil. And by that, I don't mean the ANWR, whose "hot" new estimates are at a 95% chance of having 11 billion barrels (about a year and a half of supply at OPEC's current ~25Mbl/day, assuming we could even pump that fast from a single field)
- A lighter hand in foreign government: Iraq wouldn't have been the mess it is now if we hadn't first put Saddam there. Oh, and many of Al Qaeda's top members were CIA trained (including bin Laden himself). It appears our country is short on learning from its own history. Also, let's try to have fewer influental people telling foreign heads of state that we should assassinate them.
- That our leadership joins the rest of the 16th century in condemning torture, which has been discredited for about that long as an interrogation tool. Knowing it has been used, I am led to wonder just how many of the "credibile" threats that we've had in the past few years end in "now please! take the stick out of my ass!" or "quit electrocuting my balls!"
- That the next time the US decides it wants to do something that costs more than 20 billion dollars or so, that someone sits down and writes out a real plan on what the goals are, what the plan to achieve that goal is, and what the timeline looks like. It doesn't have to be accurate -- this is the government we're talking about here -- but it needs to exist so that people can pretend that someone in charge knows just what the hell is going on.

Trees?

I'll do ya one better: ANWR

Conservation doesn't solve the supply problem. Drilling our own does.

Where humans have tread, the Arctic has suffered

I don't know about that. It worked out pretty well for the North Slope in Alaska.

If something should happen to the Saudi Royal Family, and our access to oil is lost, America is going to be shit out of luck.

Unless, of course, we decide to exploit our own oil reserves. Of course, some people seem to prefer that we remain dependent on the mideast for our energy needs.

• Arctic National Wildlife Reserve
• Gulf of Mexico
• 
  
  When we finally realize that we (people) are incapable of harming the environment in a permanent manner, these resources would end all dependence on foriegn petroleum purchases.