We are all concerned at the high price of gas and at the same time we know that we will eventually run out of oil.

John McCain, who is quickly losing my respect, and now President Bush, are advocating lifting the U.S. off-shore drilling ban with the belief that more digging will reduce prices and our problem of foreign oil dependence.

However, even with the Alaskan and off-shore oil, the U.S. has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Yet daily we account for 25 percent of the world's daily oil consumption.

Eighty-five percent of the available U.S. oil is leased to the oil companies, but 75 percent of these leased sites are not being drilled on because it is too expensive to do so. It’s not the oil companies who are clammoring for more leases, it’s the politicians.

For the past eight years the Bush policies have encouraged more drilling and that has not worked. Instead, the price has risen and we are held in a tighter oil hostage grip by foreign suppliers and speculators. Speculators only have to put down 6 percent to secure a price of future oil. They must not do much cringing when they fill up their SUVs.

More digging is really not going to help. The Law of Holes is that "when you are digging and not getting nowhere then quit digging." In Jared Diamond's Collapse, he explains that many past collapsed societies did so because they did not quit digging. Usually they were in an environment that had little resource reserve to call on when conditions worsened.

The Mayans in Mexico were very highly developed but they failed. They lived in a dry area and when it got drier they harvested wood and water further and further away until there was no more. They just kept digging. MaCain and Bush want to keep digging.

We are also digging another dry hole with corn-based ethanol as it takes more energy to produce than it yields and removes land needed for food production.

Whether we got here by intelligent design or evolution it is our intelligence we need to get beyond rolling out the barrel. More U.S. drilling will really lead to a drop in the bucket.

Real conservation measures can result in a 10 to 25 percent saving of oil and intensely developing renewable energy sources can save another 20 percent.

Clean up coal, refine nuclear safety, and make hydrogen cost effective and politicians can go back to doing what they do best, digging holes.