Dear editor:

As U.S. Rep. Fred Upton and Sen. Carl Levin are frequent contributors to your newspaper, here are a few questions I would like them to answer publicly:

1. How did the price of a barrel of oil get turned over to the speculators, and who was responsible?

2. How did turning it over to the speculators affect our economy and oil company profits?

3. How many barrels of American oil come down the Alaskan pipeline every year, and how much of that stays in the United States?

4. If we imported 750 million barrels of oil, and exported 848 million barrels of oil in the first 10 months of 2011, how do we become oil independent?

5. The media says the Keystone pipeline would bring 20,000 new jobs to the U.S., while a major university says it would bring 5,000, and that would only be for two years. Who is correct?

6. How much oil coming down the Keystone pipeline would stay in the U.S.?

Tom Probst

Niles