My father-in-law is a geologist, owner of a small oil company, and fierce conservative. His education and profession lead him to know / believe the following; oil IS a finite resource.
When I asked him what he thought about "the oil running out" his opinion was that as most known oil reserves, world wide, were producing less oil than they they used to, and as newly industrialized countries such as China and India are increasing consumption almost exponentially, that eventually there would not be enough oil to satisfy needs globally.
My feeling is that as Americans it is in our best interest to stop the importing of oil from middle east countries that, as we well know, often filter the profits they make from us to terrorist organizations, not necessarily "terrorist countries." As the old saying goes, "don't put all of your eggs into one basket," and I feel this applies to energies as well. Just think about how much would it benefit us as a nation (not saying nationalized) to develop new technologies that allowed us to harness power from our own environment in less intrusive ways, such as wind, water and solar. Sure, I think we should has less restrictive drilling, but lets concentrate adding to our options as well.
How many of you out there knew that there are companies developing what amounts to solar cells that can be printed out on to plastic sheets (http://nanosolar.com/)? How great would it be to be able to go down to home Depot or Lowe's and buy new recyclable solar panels when ours were producing less watts than normal. No more filling the pockets of power companies who happily inconvenience us, but start racking up the fee's when we're not as prompt as they'd like us.
Anyway, I'm no hippie, no tree hugger, I'm a conservative who thinks the Republican party is either out of date or too far left. But I don't think that these views on energy are very partisan, it's just working out the details that is the hard part. Unfortunately, it's not in our politicians best interest to solve the big problems, or they'd be out of jobs.