EARL!  WE STRUCK EARL! – AT 7:55 A.M. ET:  What?  Am I reading this correctly?  Could it be that a sanity bomb has exploded over the White House?  From The probably devastated New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

COMMENT:  Uh, well, you gotta work the details.  There's probably less here than meets the eye, and apparently part of the logic is to persuade on-the-fence moderate members of Congress to vote yes on a climate-change bill.  Also, actual drilling wouldn't begin for years.   

But, it is a beginning to some intelligence in energy policy.  Al Gore has not commented, but we understand that medical personnel and a minister from the Church of Global Warming are on their way to inform him, gently and in a sensitive manner.  They will bring gifts of tofu and ethanol.

We will need a much larger program than the one outlined today to lessen seriously our dependence on foreign oil.  But a dent is being made.  Also, we will need oil for decades as new energy sources are developed, tested, and are proved or disproved in the marketplace.

March 31,  2010