Drill Drill Drill?

Here's a thought experiment for you...

Let's say there is this natural resource called "shmoil". There is only a limited amount of shmoil in the entire world, and one day it will dry up. Nevertheless, shmoil is critical to the basic function of our economy and our nation would fall back into the dark ages without access to shmoil.

If you were President of this country, would you:

a) Elect to use the shmoil of other nations while shmoil prices were relatively low, in the mean time working hard to identify replacements for shmoil and thus guaranteeing you have shmoil reserves through the very end?

OR

b) Open up full exploitation of domestic shmoil early on, resulting in your nation being the first to run out of shmoil and thus being at the mercy of other nations at a time when shmoil prices are sky high due to the great lack of supply?

I vote for a).

Here's the cold reality. The USA has 3% of the world's known oil. It has 25% of the world appetite for oil. We need to be prepared to drill all 3% if it comes to it, but we don't want to open everything up  and end up having no oil reserves when the real oil crunch hits.

Ideally, we develop alternate energy resources and don't ever need to fully deplete the Earth of its oil. But we can't plan for the best and ignore the possibility of the worst. We need to manage access to our natural resources so we are guaranteed to be the last nation on Earth with oil.

We need the oil companies to drill using the oil leases they have available today and stop whining about getting access to ones they don't need access to right now.