Congress decided to go on its five-week vacation without addressing the energy crisis. Though gas prices have fallen slightly, the energy crisis still will be here when Congress gets back.

Recently, I saw an economist on CNN who had a good idea for a short-term solution. A regulatory agency needs to be created to reign in oil speculators. Speculators need to set the price of a barrel of crude oil one month at a time. This action would drop gas prices immediately and give middle-class America a much-needed break.

Long-term solutions are a different story. It will take General Motors two years to retool its assembly lines to mass produce more fuel-efficient cars. In the name of national security, open up all drilling in this country to include ANWR in Alaska.

Environmentalists say that if we open ANWR, it would upset the mating habits of caribou herds. The reality is that when the caribou herds hear the banging and clanging of oil exploration, they simply will move to another area. Alaska is a huge state. Wildlife and oil exploration can peacefully coexist.

Barack Obama was naive when he suggested that we build cars that get 150 miles per gallon. America is not ready to trade in their cars for small motorscooters. It’s going to take a healthy combination of conservation, short-term and long-term solutions to beat this energy crisis problem.

William McKee Jr.

Flowery Branch

Well, now it can be told. I heard it from Pete Van Wieren on the Braves radio network.

The Braves were behind again. At 8:58 p.m., Aug. 13, Chip Caray noted in passing that Chicago has seen fewer hot days (90-plus degrees) this year than in many decades.

Van Wieren gave the summary of the century. It’s called global cooling, he said.

When baseball announcers state it as a matter of fact, you better believe that Americans of every sort (even the environmentalists) know what is happening.

The Earth is not getting warmer. Even though carbon dioxide keeps on increasing because China keeps on pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (more than anybody else on the globe), the Earth has not gotten warmer for the past 10 years.

Climatologists have known this for some years now, but scientists like James Hansen at NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Science often have too much of their career invested in man-made warming to actually be scientific about the issue.

Praise God for sanity. Van Wieren put his finger on the point. It’s called global cooling. Check it out at http://icecap.us.

You, however, had better tell Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, because they don’t understood any of this. They are part of the gang of 10 pushing the Energy Reform Act of 2008. This bill will make everything worse for everybody. Check it out on their Web sites.

For example, this bill mandates even more ethanol bio fuels, and then prevents drilling within 50 miles of the U.S. coastline. Apparently, Cuba and Russia can and will drill within 50 miles of our coasts in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Arctic Ocean, but we cannot. This is madness.

The senators do not understand, yet, so join me in telling them.

The Earth is NOT getting warmer. It’s called global cooling.

WT "Ted" Hinds

Gainesville