Finding nothing but politician's promises.

Even as gas prices have dipped a bit below $4, the political debate over future energy policies has exploded.
It’s no accident that politicians are talking almost nonstop about oil. A majority of Americans are now telling pollsters that a candidates’ ideas for solving the energy problem—defined as excessive dependence on Middle Eastern oil and too high prices—are more important than his views on the war in Iraq. They are also saying that offshore drilling—which an otherwise discredited President Bush strongly supports—should be part of the solution. They are telling the pollsters that they want action now.
This shift in public opinion hasn’t reduced Bush’s unpopularity, but it has benefited John McCain. His “drill, drill, drill” mantra seems to have helped close the gap with Barack Obama in opinion polls. And it has had more concrete consequences as well: in June alone, he scooped up more than $1.2 million in new donations from Texan oil and gas interests, according to the latest campaign finance reports.
Obama has a problem. A month ago he was outraged by Bush’s drilling proposal: “Offshore drilling,” he said, “would not lower prices today, and it would not lower prices tomorrow. John McCain knows that.”
Now he’s had a change of heart. Although he still says that drilling is “not a particularly meaningful short-term or long-term solution,” he nevertheless says he’s for it. Polls, after all, are polls—and politicians are politicians.
The question, of course, is whether any of this really matters.
According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the answer is, more or less, no. The EIA says that, even if the federal ban on new offshore drilling were lifted today, production would not start before 2017 and not have a significant impact on production levels or prices before 2030.
Twenty-two years is an eternity—in politics and maybe even in oil. There is a growing school of thought among scientists and petroleum engineers that the world is coming close to a permanent decline in oil production. Pessimists think we are already at or near so-called peak oil. Optimists think that global oil reserves may not begin to drop until 2040. In other words, the big difference is when production will fall.
Of course, whoever wins in November will probably be long out of office by the time that happens. But wouldn’t we all be better served if the candidates spent more time telling us how they think the country can live in a world without oil, instead of simply listening to the polls?