I gotta chime in here ....

First, I operate four trucks that cover six counties. Picking and choosing which days my trucks will get filled up is simply not an option. Without a major reduction in the commercial uses of motor fuels, any boycott would be completely pointless.

Second, the primary drivers of price are supply and demand. This is basic economics, folks, and it is NOT theory. That is what this boycott idea is based on. But just shifting the demand from one day to another is not going to impact price. Either demand needs to fall or supply needs to rise over an extended period of time.

You can preach conservation until you are blue in the face. If we have a healthy economy, energy demand is going to rise, period, end of story! The only way to significantly decrease energy demand is to trash the economy.

So! That leaves only one option for reducing price, and that is to increase energy supplies. There are two ways this can be done. The easiest and least expensive is to increase production capability for the energy products we currently use. Even though this COULD be done, WE HAVE NOT BEEN DOING IT!! We have not developed our domestic oil supplies, we have not aggressively protected our foreign sources, and we have not built a new refinery in this country in 35 years. This is IDIOCY! As with so many other issues, a great many problems could be solved with a drastic reduction in political correctness.

The second strategy that could be used to increase supply is to develop alternatives to current technologies. There has been a LOT of money and research thrown at this approach. To date, no economically viable alternative has been found, or developed. At this time, none of the possible alternatives are financially competitive with hydro-carbon based fuels and the internal combustion engine. Until one of them becomes competitive, either from the cost of hydro-carbon fuels increasing, or the cost of the alternative decreasing, the hydro-carbon fuels will be our primary energy source.

The fastest, and least expensive means of moderating energy costs is to ensure our supply of crude and increase refining capabilities. There are considerable crude reserves available domestically so that we could increase crude supply without shooting Hugo Chavez and Ahmadinejad in the head, and we certainly have the resources and expertise to build new refineries.

What needs to happen is that those with half an ounce of common sense need to become noisier than the politically correct crowd. Unfortunately, most of those with that common sense are busy leading their lives and don't have the time to be activists, and the politically correct crowd live for activism.

There is the nub of the problem. I don't have a magical answer because I don't think most of us are going to take time off from our lives to start making a lot of noise until our lifestyles are seriously threatened. We are a long way from that point yet. Much as everyone whines about fuel costs, we still buy the gas and live our comfortable lives pretty much as we have, unwilling to take the risks to our livestyles necessary to be noisy enough to effect change.

Reg