America's future has been mortgaged to our addiction to fossil fuels. Global warming, instability in the Middle East, and high gas prices are just a few of the warning signs of the price we are paying for our inertia about our energy lifestyles.

Most American families are hard-pressed by the rapid increases in the price of gasoline. Some are calling for drilling on federal property in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. I am opposed to these proposals. Oil companies are currently utilizing only one quarter of area leased for drilling.  Estimates are that 79% of the available oil in the Gulf of Mexico is within the area currently available for drilling. It will be decades before large amounts of oil flow from new fields, so they will not reduce the burden on consumers in the short and medium terms. These fields are further offshore or in harsh climates, making them far more expensive to develop than existing fields. More than 25 years have passed since a major refinery was built in the United States, and an increase in the flow of crude will not affect the price of gasoline if that bottleneck continues. The fields proposed by new off-shore drilling are in sensitive and irreplaceable natural environments, and don't hold enough oil to justify the risks to these priceless habitats. Oil companies drilling on government land should be required to pay royalties at world market rates for oil recovered there. These royalties should be used to fund research, development, and implementation of clean renewable alternative fuel technology to supplement or replace fossil fuels.

 Policies I would support include:

• Tax credits and loan guarantees to ordinary citizens to purchase hybrid vehicles and fuel cell vehicles
• Investment in a national hydrogen highway to provide fueling stations for fuel cell vehicles
• Increased production of plug-in hybrid vehicles
• Tax credits and loan guarantees to households and businesses for solar and wind systems
• Increased production and distribution of bio-fuels using non-feed stocks
• Low interest loans to energy producers to build commercial-scale solar power plants

All of this technology is currently available and will have an immediate impact on reducing demand, decreasing green house emissions, creating jobs, and kick starting certain sectors of the economy.

Even conservative critics of environmental regulation have begun to abandon their doubts about global warming. The vast majority of Americans have come to accept that we must commit to a sustained and concerted effort to reduce our carbon emissions. With four percent of the world's population, we produce more than a quarter of its carbon emissions. While there may be promising technologies to replace fossil fuels for power generation, none of these technologies is a substitute for the conservation of energy. I support public-private cooperation to arrange low-interest loans to homeowners and business owners to retrofit energy-saving improvements. The loans can use the customer's energy savings as collateral. This would consume a minimum of taxpayer funds, create a market for contractors who would install these retrofits, and create demand for solar and wind, which are far more cost-effective in energy-efficient buildings.

To maintain stability and growth, we must:

• Take away subsidies to oil companies and begin regulating speculators again
• Build new refineries to end the bottleneck and reduce manipulation of supply
• Force US companies to make better use of existing drilling areas before gaining access to new areas
• Increase production and distribution of bio-fuels using non-food crops

I am in favor of a mandatory cap-and-trade system, which would assess fees for businesses' emissions, place caps on carbon dioxide and allow them to purchase additional permits from a secondary market. This would give businesses incentives to conserve energy and to replace fossil fuels with green alternatives. I favor increasing the caps at a rate that will allow us to meet our aim of cutting carbon emissions by 75% by 2050. Income from the permits can be used to provide tax credits to households that install green energy technologies. This will create good-paying jobs in green technologies.

I support increasing the fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars and light trucks. This would not only reduce our carbon footprint by hundreds of millions of tons a year, but would also make American automakers more competitive overseas, where gasoline is even more expensive and regulations more strict.

By addressing our energy problems in multiple ways for both households and businesses, we can help reduce the financial and health burdens of our children and grandchildren. We can also restore our lost credibility on this issue, allowing us to get treaties that address India and China as well as emissions from the developed world, allowing us to dramatically reduce emissions worldwide. We would also end our dependence on foreign oil and allow us to pursue our national interests independent of the dangerous and unstable regions that produce most of the world's oil and gas.