Gas Prices and Energy Independence

So it's obviously going to be a Democrat that wins the next election. As unsatisfied with how a Republican ran the country for the last two terms, it is almost a sure thing. Personally, I think that there should be an unlimited amount of terms that a President can serve. It would keep them on their toes. It seems like during the second terms, they get the attitude of 'well I can't get elected again anyways so who cares.' I also think we need to switch from Republican to Democrat EACH time because they keep the country balanced - which would be pretty unrealistic to require it, but still would probably work out better if it happened by chance.


But anyways, which Democrat will it be? Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Due to my current frustration with the current president, I decided to do some research and get educated on the subject. I am doing a separate blog for each issue, so it doesn't take me a month to do one post.

Gas Prices and Energy Independence - This caught my attention since I pay $200/mo. in gas just driving back and forth to work. The leaders of the oil companies are driving silver cars and living in ridiculous mansions but we just have to take money out of our grocery budgets to hand over to them.. We give the dictators 800 million dollars a day, twice what we paid before George W. Bush!

"The Obama plan to create an energy independent America will cut U.S. oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels of oil per day, take 50 million cars worth of pollution off the road, and save American consumers more than $50 billion at the gas pump." He also plans to increase federal investment in energy efficiency. He said he will lift the cap that is placed on tax credits for consumers buying energy efficient hybrid vehicles. He also claims that he will get 20% of our nation's power supply to be from renewable sources by the year 2020.

Hillary plans to put 50 billion into R & D for developing renewable energy - from which she claims will come from the oil companies, not our tax money. I have seen some claims though that say she is going to increase tax on gas prices for the research though. She also has a plan dedicated to achieving energy independence, but I did not find many details on how it would work. The economy was doing so well with Bill in office, and many people feel she probably ran most of his presidency anyways. I still don't think it's safe to assume we will have the same prosperity as we did with Bill's terms though.

Theses both sound pretty similar - they both realize there's a problem, that is a good start I guess. They both seem to have voted very similarly to each other in the past on energy related issues as well. I did like the concreteness of Obama's numbers, but I'm sure it's not anywhere near a guarantee. He seemed to address things more specifically than Hillary did. I'm curious how she plans to make big oil companies fund research; if we had that much power to control them, why haven't we used it yet? Am I missing something there? Does anyone have a more detailed explanation of her plans? I couldn't find many specifics online, not even her own campaign site. So if you understand this issue better, enlighten me!

What are some ways that you try to conserve gas? Are you trying to conserve at all? If you have some examples of things you do personally to cut down on gas, please share!