The main reason is infrastructure, which means how we get the oil from the oil well to homes and businesses.

As in, for example, pipelines.

To do that, oil companies need to pass environmental hurdles that are extremely time-consuming. Why aren't we asking, instead: Gee, how long would it take if there were no environmental hurdles?

This is such a critical issue because even if it is wind power or solar, it needs to be delivered from its source. Same issue: environmental regulations.

Let's examine how we have tied ourselves into such tight environmental knots that we have allowed ourselves to become engaged in the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, and it is being transferred from us, to our enemies.

We can't have our cake and eat it too. There are tough, grown-up choices to be made.

For example, it is going to take some time to undo the effects of 30 years worth of not building new nuclear power plants. We have people who know what they are doing, but their skills are a bit rusty and they want to move cautiously and get it right.

The fact that it may take 10-12 years to build our first new nuclear plant (from the time of project start, which is actually a couple of years in the past) is not terribly troubling when one considers that the new plant has a likelihood of operating for 60-80 years based on what we can see from our existing plants.

Drilling off shore is also hard work, but look what happened in Norway and Great Britain when they discovered oil and gas in the North Sea. In each case, they developed excellent technology and supplied abundant, low cost energy for several decades. Sure, there is no panacea, but we will be using large quantities of controllable energy for as long as we have a functioning society, so we need to keep investing in new supplies to replace the ones that we are using.

Weather dependent sources like the sun and wind are destined to forever be supplements that show up when and where they want. I like power supplies that free me from the weather, not those that make me even more vulnerable when bad weather happens.