The United States cannot do much about it if a hostile oil-producing regime such as Venezuela's decides to stop selling us its oil.
We also don't have a quick and easy solution when unstable, radical Muslim nations such as Iran issue threats to do things such as close the important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil passes.
And we cannot help the fact that growing economies in places such as India and Communist China create greater demand for the world's oil supplies, driving up prices.
But we can make the decision to expand environmentally responsible, safe oil drilling in frozen, barely populated areas of Alaska. And we can agree to build a job-creating pipeline to bring oil from friendly Canada to U.S. refineries. Or at least we could if President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats weren't standing in the way.
Unfortunately, they are. On a mostly party-line vote, Democrats in the Senate killed a measure that would have allowed the Alaska drilling and that would have approved construction of the Keystone pipeline from Canada. And even if Congress had approved the bill, the president surely would have vetoed it, keeping us needlessly dependent on oil from unfriendly nations.
So does it surprise anyone that we're paying in the neighborhood of $4 for a gallon of gas nowadays?