connecting the dots

In an editorial, the NY Times looked at our vulnerability to natural gas embargos and nuclear proliferation, concluding:

Clearly, becoming less dependent on foreign sources should be among the West's - and most especially America's - most urgent priorities. But not in the way that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney seem to prefer, which is to try to drill our way out of dependency - an utterly impossible task for a country that uses one-fourth of the world's oil while possessing only 3 percent of its reserves, and whose once-abundant supplies of natural gas are now severely stressed. A much better answer would be a national commitment to more efficient vehicles and to the rapid deployment of new energy sources like biofuels.

So the solution somehow lies in efficiency and in biofuels. Why doesn't the paper of record further investigate that supposed solution? The questions are very simple.

1. With finite supplies of fossil fuels (the earth is round, Mr. Friedman), how much time does efficiency buy us before we seriously feel the inevitable oil shortages?
2. Can we produce enough biofuel to replace oil? As we've seen before, there are major problems with biofuels as a solution. It took hundreds of thousands of years to transform solar energy into fossil fuels through geologic processes. Do we really expect to compress that into a real time replacement of our fossil fuel consumption? As John Mac used to say, Get Serious.

This week there was an explosion in a coal mine in West Virginia costing the lives of 12 hard-working men. Did anyone tie that to our dependence on fossil fuels?