BACK TO THE '70S?

Wasn't it two years ago that then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi vowed, if her party took over Congress, to cut energy prices -- especially gasoline? Since then the cost of energy is up more than 70 percent. Under Pelosi's "common-sense plan," Congress has achieved nothing. Actually, less than nothing, considering that what little has been done has hurt, rather than helped the United States to become more energy self-sufficient:

• This year alone, we'll spend $431 billion to buy 3.7 billion barrels of imported oil to run our economy.
• And in so doing, we are enriching some of the world's most unsavory regimes.

Ironically, we have plenty of oil:

• At least 10 billion barrels in Alaska's National Wildlife Reserve. [Caribou could trip on a rig; off limits]
• 30 billion or so offshore. [not in sight of my beach house; off limits]
• 1.2 trillion in Rocky Mountain oil-shale. [classified 'alternative' fuel, carbon footprint must be less than liquid oil, isn't; off limits]

Unfortunately, Democrats' extreme green ideology keeps us from drilling for it. Clean coal technologies likewise have been put out of bounds. So has the most logical answer to our energy problem -- nuclear power plants that can be run safely with spent rods reprocessed. France already does this to meet 80 percent of its energy needs.

Democrats have focused instead on a global warming plan that would cost $1.2 trillion. Meanwhile, subsidies and other breaks for biofuels have helped send food prices soaring. As in the 1970s, this is a human-made crisis -- one that has solutions. But it's the Democrats, along with a few equally misguided Republicans, who steadfastly refuse to implement them.

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