"'Bugs and bunnies are more important than people. It just makes you want to give up.' said Charlie Beard, owner of an oil field service company and a developer who feels hamstrung by state and federal regulations. "

No surprise here. Making it hard enough to make you "want to give up" is, of course, precisely the idea of so many of the enviromentalists.

Sounds like a delightful place to live.

You go, samhill! We need time to develop new types of energy and as my mother says, "We'll always need some oil." I'm a lover of National Parks. My goal is to go to as many as possible, as don't call me an anti-environmentalist. I would join the Sierra Club, but they're so left-winged obsessive, I'd be to embarrassed to admit I belonged.

San Joaquin Valley crude is nasty stuff that exists in a near solid state. You could strip mine it easier than heat it up to the point that it flows. Then there's the sulfur. High sulfur content. Ever smell that stuff?

Better to do what we're doing - make Iraq the 51st state.

let me know when you are ready, and I will pack my bags and be ready to work there....

We have to babysit the middle east because we won't develop our own resources and because people here insist on driving cars bigger than they need.

America ought to get some very strict and high CAFE standards and lower speed limits before we send our young off to war to be killed and damaged.

They are not fighting for our freedom. They are fighting for our waste of energy resources and for our refusal to develop our own, including nuclear, wind, solar and oil.

I agree, we should be developing alternative sources of energy. Utrecht University in The Netherlands is making some exciting advancements right now in solar energy. The US has no excuse and should be so much further ahead in developing alternative sources; but for right now, the world needs oil.

You really have to ask though, why American automakers are thrilled if they put cars on the market that get 30mpg’s? Volkswagen sells a European model that gets 70+ mpg’s, but won’t market it in the US. Trust me, I’ve seen it and asked VW if there were any plans to bring it to the US, and the answer was no. I hate to sound paranoid, but IMO, the oil companies have some powerful lobbyists, when the US has done almost no research into alternative sources of energy, and our vehicles get the worst gas mileage of any country in the world.

you know what they are or aren't fighting for? This article is about a booming oil town in California. For Pete's sake every chance for someone to whine about the war.

Yes, we need them, and no, we aren't spending enough on them, and why? Because we've sent TRILLIONS of dollars to the middle east, and those trillions have no interest in anything but oil.

We need to drill for and tax domestic oil at the same time we're double taxing foreign oil, while providing significant tax credits to alternative energy sources.