The gas tax holiday is a gimmick and wouldn't make much difference --- the government does not need to add more to our national debt to bring us this gimmick just so they can look like they are "doing something." I felt the same way about the "stimulous" tax rebate gimmick. The government borrows money from other governments (mostly the Chinese) so that they can give us cash --- it will come back to us in the form if higher taxes later to pay back the loan plus interest.

Long term, I don't think the oil companies need the subsidies and tax breaks they get. They are making plenty of money without taxpayers adding to their profits. If we are going to sudsidize energy production, it should be in a from that adds to our long-term energy independence and sustainability. Things like solar energy, wind, geothermal, etc. These systems where you pay for the equipment once and then it just makes energy for the cost of maintenance, without any fuels added, are the way to go.

I also like a lot of the technologies that recover fuel from waste, like methane recovery from landfills --- the local garbage company is soon going to add a liquification facility to our local landfill to liquify methane and use it to fuel their fleet of garbage trucks. Waste Mgmt. Plans Landfill Gas-to-Fuel Plant in California | GreenBiz.com And there are methane digesters that take organic waste and ferment it into methane in a controlled way too, rather than just piping it out of the landfill.

There is a company that has a prcess that can turn just about anything organic into oil --- garbage, tires, sewage, slaughterhouse waste. Their pilot program concentrated mostly on slaughterhouse waste, because it has a lot of fat that is already halfway to oil. Here's the Discover magazine articel where i heard about it: Anything Into Oil | Alternative Energy | DISCOVER Magazine Here is the company's website: Changing World Technologies, Inc.

I also like the cars that run on used vegetable oil, or on biodeisel from waste oil. But I'm not as much in favor of the biofuel craze --- grwing agricultural crops for use as biodeisel or ethanol. In the future those might become more benign with technologies to break down cellulose into ethanol, but right now they are not a good environemental tradeoff.

Garbage is a problem, chciken guts are a problem, old used fryer oil is a problem. These technologioes that turn waste into fuels are amazing to me. They solve two problems at once. Now with fossil fuel getting so expensive, these other technologies can finally be economically viable.