But historically speaking, the promises of technology in drilling have been borne out. Whereas renewables research has always over-promised and under-delivered.

The only difference I can think of, is that the government funded the renewables research.

I've heard elsewhere that they're actually not going to build roads, but use ice-roads to ship heavy equipment. There's probably some risk of a spill, but oil spills on land are generally localized, ie, immediately around the pipeline, which is still comparatively little area.

Here's an interesting article for ya. "Can the U.S. return to its long-gone throne as the world's top producer of crude oil? A Goldman Sachs report, quoted in the Sunday Times of London recently, contended that shale plays and new technologies could push total production to 10.9 million barrels per day by 2017. " http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/article.aspx?subjectid=49&articleid=20111008_49_E1_CUTLIN650117&allcom=1

Snopes doesn't disagree with calling the area a wasteland, scroll to the very bottom. http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/anwr.asp Tiny area by a fraction of ANWR.

ANWR is just an example, there's loads of oil all over the US and offshore which the US gov doesn't allow to be drilled.

And you can not get an accurate estimate of an oil field without actually drilling into and extracting oil from that field. So we have very little idea of how much oil is actually there in the US.

Plus, any current estimate would be with current technologies and doesn't take into account technological improvement and the inevitable increase of extractable oil over time.

On the other hand, "Do Something, Anything" is generally not a good response, especially when our knowledge is awfully incomplete.

Absolutely. I don't know how subsidized they are, but remove subsidies from everything. Food, nuclear, coal, oil and everything else.

It's never going to be that drastic, it isn't like a tap that just turns off. There's going to be plenty of warning for peak oil, you would see oil discoveries reduce a fair bit beforehand. Besides, the US could probably afford to pay more for oil than the rest of the world, and thus have more time to adapt.

You are asking to switch to renewable sources which are not ready yet. More dams are unlikely to be built. Nuclear is unlikely due to NIMBY. Solar+wind are not capable of providing large scale power yet. Switching away from oil will therefore damage the economy and reduce quality of life overall.

War is different, all sorts of things happen due to necessity during wartime. People accept all sorts of limits for the duration of a war.

"It's better to keep people poor, so they can be more environmentally friendly." Is that a fair summary of what you're trying to say ? This is generally not true poorer countries are generally not as environmentally friendly as rich ones.

It is the bigger economy, the stronger economy which is better capable of adaptation. See the difference between floods in say Katrina and floods in Pakistan. A richer country could afford to spend more on gas, and also more on alternate sources of energy, if and when peak oil occurs.

I don't support the bailouts either. Defense is one of the few things that is actually necessary.

Nobody's talking about repealing the Clean Air Act. There is/was a real issue with pollution, but it's possible to go too far in reducing it. The costs of any legislation also need to be taken into account.

Additionally, people can and do make that tradeoff, which is why people still work in coal mines, petrochemical factories and other polluted hazardous conditions.

It's only a tiny area of ANWR that they want to drill in. The area that is to be developed is remote, uninhabited, doesn't have much wildlife and has been called a wasteland.

Most of our lives are spent in delaying actions. In the long run, we are all dead.

How would that help anything? When subsidies fall below a certain point, solar panel sales will drop. It is essentially the same as subsidizing panel purchases, but I suppose the drop will be more gradual.

Are you expecting a sudden drop in panel prices, a sudden improvement in efficiency or something like that?

There are problems of course, otherwise everyone would be rushing out to buy these panels. For starters, things like cloud cover which reduce efficiency. Additional spending on things like grid-ties inverters. This is pretty informative: http://www.weatherimagery.com/blog/solar-panels-cost-effective/ A large power station has different issues, it needs a suitable sunny location, or it won't work very well on cloudy days. Even in the desert there's the occasional cloudy day, so it may not be able to provide base power, and always has to be backed up with a conventional power plant.