I was pleased to see that the president is again considering offshore drilling and additional nuclear plants. It would be advantageous to all of our citizens to be able to benefit from more than 85 percent of both oil and gas that has been put off limits in the Outer Continental Shelf offshore of America.

He should also consider removing the “moratorium” on trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in Colorado. Plus, there are trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the Rocky Mountains that are also “off limits.”

In Alaska’s ANWR region there are over four billion barrels of oil. Drilling there would help to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. The world’s largest deposit of clean, low-sulfur coal in Utah, approximately seven billion tons of it, could also be tapped to reduce our foreign dependency.

These federal lands belong to all of us, and so do the resources that lie beneath them. Just think of the new jobs that would be created by developing these resources.

Let us hope that the president’s recent speech wasn’t just rhetoric, as it was during his campaign. We can “drill and dig” our way out of this recession.

R. Knapp

Kenosha