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U.S. must address energy crisis and develop energy independence Dear Editor: I just filled up my SUV this morning and paid $4.19 per gallon of 93 octane gasoline at a local Huntington gas station. Just a few weeks ago, I was paying $3.79 at the same station and wondered how much longer we're going to have to pay these kinds of prices before something is done. A friend of mine said that gas prices are like the weather..... everybody's talking about it but no one can do anything about it. But the reality is that there ARE things that can be done to stop this madness but it will take some courageous action from our elected officials and that might be asking a bit too much. However, in the event our elected officials are paying attention, let me offer two solutions to this ugly supply and demand predicament we find ourselves in these days. First, we need to suspend the purchase of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve farm. While it is critical that we maintain sufficient reserves as a nation, our current supply is ample to protect us for quite some time! In addition, prices will come down over the next few months, and when they do, we can purchase the needed reserves at a lower price than today. The second thing we should do is to get our elected officials to vote to drill for oil in the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. It is estimated that oil reserves in ANWR are in the neighborhood of 10 billion barrels, and access to that oil would boost domestic production by close to 20 percent. The proposal to drill for oil in ANWR would limit oil facilities to just 2,000 of ANWR's 19 million acres (0.01 percent) yet environmentalists and many of our representatives in Congress, including Steve Israel, refuse to see this as a viable alternative. Drilling in ANWR would provide more than 1 million barrels of oil a day for the next 30 years and would create more than 1 million new jobs across the nation.
Both of these suggestions would help bring some sanity to this oil price situation in the U.S. and our elected officials should react NOW to bring prices back down to reality. Instead of attacking oil companies and the profits they are generating, which by the way are still lower than those generated by the beverage and tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies, electrical companies, computer equipment and chemical companies, our elected officials should be focused on finding creative ways to utilize the resources that
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