It goes without saying that we aren't going to be bringing the whole planet up to American living standards unless something changes in the way we do things. China is sucking up a lot of the oil now.

Drilling more wells wouldn't hurt, and if we had gone into Alaska and several other places back in the 90s, we'd be looking better right now. But that's just a stopgap.

In the next several decades we are going to need to start weaning ourselves off of oil as a fuel. Nuclear power would be good, and I would like to see China heading in this direction, hopefully with more of an eye to safety than the Soviets had.

Other approaches, like solar power satellites, may also work in the long run. Personally, I think there will be breakthroughs in regular ground-based solar cells that may change the picture. High fossil fuel prices will go a long way to encouraging alternatives. The law of supply and demand always works, but nobody ever said it was painless.

Speaking of China, although the very mention of it can give an environmentalist instant apoplexy, the Three Gorges Dam project will generate 18,000 megawatts of power, the equivalent of about nine nuclear plants. While it does make major changes to the landscape, it burns no fossil fuels, and generates neither CO2 or nuclear waste. It seems to me to be a reasonable approach for China under the circumstances.