In an interview with ABC, President Obama gave his views of opening the U.S. oil reserves to combat high oil prices:

“We are monitoring the situation very closely. The strategic petroleum reserve was designed for when oil actually shuts off,” Obama told ABC.

“The reserves, I think, are something that we’ve got to be very careful about. And what we don’t want to do is catch ourselves in a situation, particularly when things are uncertain in the Middle East, where we’re using it now and it turns out we need more later.”

While I shed a tear every time I fill up, I have to agree with the President on this. The oil reserves aren’t a silver bullet to high prices. Once the reserves are gone, they have to be refilled. What if prices are even higher then? Well that’s more we have to pay out to the reserves.

Another, very plausible scenario is the instability in the Middle East right now. We are talking about a region that 100 or 1,000 year uprisings are not uncommon. If we opened up the reserves now, we don’t know what might happen tomorrow or next year. We could see some major uprising or war that shuts off a big chunk of the supply. With depleted reserves, we would be stuck with even higher prices.

Sadly there isn’t a simple solution to the current oil prices. Some say we should start drilling here, but even if we started today, we wouldn’t see anything pumping out for at least 10 years.

Alternative energy also isn’t the big winner, and that is our fault. We could have seized on this, if instead of bickering, our country got behind a plan years ago and moved forward on it. Sadly though we aren’t the same as we were in the 60’s, when Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon. Now we are a country of “can’t” instead of “can”.

I think the one thing that really irks me is the organized efforts to get people to not buy gas on a certain date. This would accomplish nothing. Even if you don’t buy gas, you are still using it. So no one buys gas on Monday. That puts a hurt in sales for that day, but on Tuesday everyone will fill up and give the gas companies a record day. If the gas companies are smart, they would jack the prices up on Tuesday morning, just to really increase the sales.

The only viable and immediate solution is for people to conserve. Combine trips, car pool, use public transportation and take vacations close to home. Of course a lot of this will hurt the economy, but it’s the best chance we have to help keep gas prices under control, or at least keep a little more money  in our wallets.