Stimulus for All, Except Oil Companies Working in Utah

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar cancelled oil and gas leases on 130,000 acres in Utah last week.

The signal sent here is that if America is going to get stimulus money to invigorate our economy and create jobs, those jobs are not going to be in the oil and gas sector. And if we are going to ween ourselves off foreign oil, we are apparently not going to consider developing our domestic oil resources in the interim.

That's too bad. Any cohesive energy policy that expects to succeed is going to have to include developing domestic oil and gas reserves, otherwise it simply will not work. Nuclear plants and the implementation and distribution of wind and solar power will take many years to develop. What are we supposed to fuel our economy with in the meantime if we don't use oil during this transitional period?