The Wall Street Journal on May 29 trumpeted Shell's $4.7 billion purchase of the Warrendale-based East Resources -- "one of the biggest players in the exploration of the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation" -- in a "transaction that underscores the frenzied global interest in North American shale gas resources."

Meanwhile, we are watching daily as the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmentalists warned us about the risks of offshore drilling, but we thought we knew better. Environmentalists warn us now of serious problems to come with shale gas extraction.

Is there an alternative to the seemingly endless cycle of drill, spill and burn?

Yes -- simply by recycling energy.

How? Hybrid vehicles.

Hybrids recycle energy. They represent the future of American transportation and are the key to making significant reductions in our consumption of fossil fuel and our production of greenhouse gases.

Consider that we have built a worldwide infrastructure to recycle bottles, cans, newspapers, cars, concrete, computers -- almost anything you can name. But has there ever been a worldwide shortage of newspaper? Or soda bottles? Have we ever gone to war over newsprint? Have we ever invaded another country to protect our access to bottles?

Recycling bottles, newspapers and old Toyotas is important, but energy is central to the very existence of our civilization, yet we make no effort to recycle it.

This must change, and it is what hybrid vehicles are designed to do.

Engineers invented hybrids to allow for the recycling of energy, not because some law of physics says electric motors get better mileage -- they don't. They simply allow the kinetic energy of motion to be recaptured and stored for future reuse. No other drive system does this.

Basic physics tells us that energy is required to get a vehicle moving. In conventional vehicles, that energy comes from petroleum, which is converted into kinetic energy by a combustion engine. To stop, though, our vehicles dump this kinetic energy as heat generated by the brakes -- an extravagantly wasteful process that repeats itself over and over, day in, day out.

Anyone who threw away bottles, cans or newspapers this way would be vilified for wasting natural resources. But when it comes to wasting energy, it's perfectly acceptable?

With a hybrid, a car's motion is instead slowed by the braking action of its electric motor as it converts the kinetic energy into electrical energy, which is stored in the battery. To get the car moving again, this stored energy is converted by the electric motor back to kinetic energy. This process repeats itself over and over, subject only to the efficiency of the recycling process -- which can be as high as 90 percent.

Broadly applied, this means we could reduce our transportation energy consumption by 50 percent to 75 percent just by recycling. And we could do it quickly, with today's technology. We no longer would need deepwater oil wells or risky gas extraction regimes.

To achieve this, all vehicles, after a reasonable phase-in period, should be required to recycle energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency should institute a rating system that measures each vehicle's recycling efficiency. This would be similar to today's mileage rating system, but much more useful.

Aside from informing consumers, this rating system also could be used by the government to fund research that speeds the development of high-efficiency vehicles. The ratings could be used to self-direct research grants to automakers.

Instead of giving loans for research that may have no direct benefit, we could use an R&D tax credit system based on achieved recycling efficiency. For producing a certain number of vehicles that recycle, say, 10 percent of their kinetic energy, an automaker would receive R&D tax credits of, say, $10 million. For the same number of cars that recycle 20 percent, the manufacturer would receive double the credits, or $20 million. And so on.

Credits would be provided only for actual gains generated -- not for dead-end research. Grants could be quite large for vehicles that achieve 75 percent efficiency or more. And they quickly would pay for themselves in fuel savings.

This incentive program would make moot the issues of mileage standards and vehicle weight. High-efficiency hybrids necessarily would get excellent mileage, and it is much harder to recycle energy in a large SUV than in a small, lightweight vehicle.

Detroit's engineers won't be able to achieve SUV recycling percentages much over 10 or 15 percent because slowing a behemoth SUV creates too much current for a battery to absorb. The engineers would scramble to find ways to reduce weight so as to increase the percentage of recycled energy. Vehicle weight reductions of 75 percent are achievable with today's techniques and materials.

The engineers would find that strong, lightweight vehicles can be very safe indeed -- more so than current heavy designs. And cars routinely would achieve 80 to 100-plus miles per gallon -- some much more. As an additional benefit, lighter cars require significantly less energy to produce and cost significantly less to maintain.

This is not fantasy: My hybrid uses 10-year-old technology and averages 70 mpg (it also has its original brakes at 100,000 miles). In 1999 the Rocky Mountain Institute designed the Hypercar, a practical, ultra-strong, ultralight vehicle that can be manufactured with today's technology. Kids in Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering Formula Hybrid program are having a great time designing and building hybrid race cars.

Imagine if the professional auto designers in Detroit suddenly got on board and produced exciting futuristic vehicles that treat the world's precious hydrocarbons like newspapers or beer cans. They could create exciting new jobs in a field with worldwide appeal. They could help wean us from offshore-drilled or shale-hydrofracked fossil fuels that endanger the environment. They could help reduce the production of greenhouse gases that imperil our planet. They could save us a lot of money while sending a lot less of our money to oil-saturated regimes that wish us ill or draw us into wars.

So, is there an alternative to the seemingly endless cycle of drill, spill and burn?

Yes.

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.