Off-shore drilling

The Tennessean has published letters and columns maligning Democrats for resisting off-shore and ANWR drilling. These writers (David Denny, Richard Knight, Phil Valentine) seem to be missing their prefrontal lobes or are afflicted with terminal selfishness.
It would make sense for our generation to exploit and exhaust our last oil reserves only if a virus, meteorite or atomic war is expected to destroy the US in the foreseeable future. Otherwise it is ethical to leave those reserves for distant future generations to use in applications for which there is no substitute for oil. Likewise for coal and gas.
Our generation's duty is to deploy solar-thermal generators and wind turbines as fast as possible, by incentives to corporations if effective or as a TVA-like program if necessary--this in addition to much more energy-sensitive building codes, land use planning, transportation standards, and policies to encourage responsible reproduction worldwide.
The resources squandered on our unjust aggression in Iraq could have payed for this conversion to clean and sustainable energy production. Should my generation of Americans be proud or ashamed of its choices?