Foeign oil is still with us because it is profitable, and therefore has developed a constituency that will lobby for it, fight for it, and if necessary, kill for it. The only way it will go away is if an alternative can be found that is more profitable for someone else.

No matter how much oil costs the consumer, the distributors will get a percentage of that cost as profit, so there is no incentive for them to come up with alternatives. Sure, they're all in favor of alternatives that do not require any changes to this basic structure. For example, drilling more for domestic oil. But that's a very dubious prospect, the oil we pump domestically isn't any cheaper than the stuff we import, is it? Oil is a commodity, it doesn't matter where it comes from. In fact, in the highly unlikely event we made a great new oil find here in this country, and foreign sources experienced a comparable decline so the total supply was constant, the cost of oil would not change, and most of our domestic oil would go to the highest bidder. Most of the North Slope oil went to Japan, we didn't burn it here. The only real alternative, conservation, is dismissed outright because it means using less oil. People who sell us oil aren't interested in us using any less. Competing energy technologies are simply not ready and not a real threat to the oil industry. The minute they are, the oil companies will shift to them. But in the meantime. why spend their own money developing them when oil is profitable and the government might do the development work for them?

The reason we're hooked on foreign oil is because a lot of people are getting rich selling us foreign oil. And if foreign oil becomes more expensive, they can't lose because they'll just pass the increase on to us. The profit margin will remain the same.