Both the US and UK are taking steps to increase the world supply of oil, using the world food crisis as justification. Asked about rising prices, including those of food, in an interview for Yahoo, George Bush offered this solution:

...the best thing we can do is to increase supply, and to drill for oil and gas in environmentally friendly ways at home, and build more refineries. -- Politico

Meanwhile, UK Chancellor Alistair Darling told BBC radio last week:

One of the big priorities has got to be for governments all over the world to try and get oil production increased, and also to tackle this problem that was pushing up food prices that was diverting corn into biofuels in a way that is not sustainable. -- Guardian

So quite aside from the oxymoron of drilling for oil in an environmentally friendly way, oil is apparently the answer to the global crisis, rather than part of the problem. Action has already started, with George Bush visiting Saudi Arabia to ask them to pump more oil for us all. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have pumped less oil than last month, and Bush's previous attempts to encourage them to produce more were rejected. The shortage serves the OPEC countries well, after all. Further, Congress just passed a bill suspending shipments to the Strategic Petroleum Reserves until December, in an effort to release more onto the market. Bush is expected to sign the bill. The Energy Department currently stockpiles 70,000 barrels a day, into a reserve of around 702 million barrels. It is hoped that halting the supply to the reserves will create a price drop of 4 or 5 cents a gallon to the consumer. The current crisis in oil prices should be the perfect catalyst for a new energy efficiency drive -- new public transport initiatives and transitioning towards an agriculture that is less dependent on fossil fuels. It should be just what's needed to start taking the end of oil seriously. Upping oil supply at a time like this may briefly ease the politically charged problem of forecourt prices, but it strikes me as a particularly short-term strategy -- by pumping more oil, won't we get to the end of it sooner? Which is why I'm secretly hoping Saudi Arabia says no to increasing supplies.