Steve,
People make the price of all commodities...taxes and local policies are irrelevant. If there is a glut of any commodity the price goes down irrespective of government policy...it goes up if there is a shortage. It is what people are willing to pay for a good or service.
I like the anti-military stuff but you fail to answer the rubber meets the road question. If not us, who? If we recede from the world stage someone takes our place. Who takes our place in guaranteeing the free flow of basic commodities around the world? Our military spending has been going down for a long time...it's now about 4.5% of GDP.
Let's see if I got this right, we are going to use expensive renewables and this will occur in a vacuum. Energy intensive jobs will not go to China or India, where they burn a bunch of coal...and are adding coal fired plants like crazy, and they don't do diligence when it comes to pollution controls like we do. Kind of defeats the purpose and all this wonderful green stuff.
Again, we are talking NG, coal and power generation, not oil. Oil provides ~1% of power generation.
This oil thingy you are obsessed with...hmmmm...if we do not buy 17% oil, which comes form OPEC nations, it is going to stay in the ground, right? They are not going to get their coin to fund martyrdom operations, right? China and the Euro's are not going to buy what we do not buy. Help me with this.
Let's see, there was this guy called Ehrlich, who said we'd be out of basic commodities by 1985. We were not. Now, you believe your kids will not have oil. It's as anti-science a position as Erlich's. We have fracked out way to essentially energy independence on mostly private lands.
You don't seem too exercised by the loss of employment of your fellow citizens. That is the position you seem to be advocating.
