HEY KOOLAID!

I see your point, CT, and I chalk it up to oversimplification on the campaign trail. It's true he's conflating fuel standards with world oil supply, but I'm hopeful that his previous statements about planning to direct $150b at an Apollo- or Manhattan-style Project toward commercializing alternative energies will be taken up and forcefully advocated when he's president.

Clearthinker, as you might have seen in some of my comments, I've been reading more on peak oil since your last article on it.

I'm beginning to approach it as a separate issue, and this is giving me some clarity on it. Let me be specific: before, my view of peak oil was to lump it in with a coming environmental catastrophe, famine, genocide, and fascist police state, etc. Now I'm beginning to look at it in less apocalyptic/conspiracy-theorist terms, and more as a giant, but manageable, problem, though still one of great moral consequence.

I'd like to get your opinion on Permaculture. For some time now I've thought of Permaculture as a legitimate way out, at least from a survivalist perspective. But leaving the survivalism aside, on your scale of alternatives, where does permaculture rank? My sense is it is something that has a very high practical ranking, but would rank lower when thinking about feasability-- meaning political and social acceptance of a very different way of life.

I guess as a follow up question- do you believe there is a moral imperative to fire the grid at all costs, in order to prevent massive starvation and death? Or do you believe that 6+ billion people is an unmanageable situation to begin with, and we simply must come down from there. Right now my feeling is: we have got to fire that grid. Though it is due to our own greed and gluttony, billions do not deserve to die because of it. And even if they do deserve it, there seems to be a strong moral imperative to stop this death at all costs.

WOW! The big fella pandered! So he is human after all.

I'd still take him over the other 2 crooks! McBomb and Clinton have ZERO integrity. I'm not saying Obama has a truckload but he's got more his 2 opponents.

Hey, top 10! And you were worried :)

You are wrong.

1. Washington is responsible for the price of gas. They invaded Iraq. It was $20 a barrel before. Now its $120.

2. Secondly, by Washington pandering to Detroit, they've kept very bad fuel efficiency for decades. That uses more fuel. Using more fuel raises prices by increasing demand.

"But, 30 years without raising fuel efficiency standards is a failure of our government and auto makers."

Yep.

Wow, interesting topic. I don't think you can have a rational discussion about skyrocketing oil prices without factoring in the arrogance of Bush/Cheney economic and pre-emptive war policies. Every time an oil producing country has made a move away from the dollar to trading for euros, it has spelled trouble.
Saddam Hussein was making an effort to increase oil production which would have driven the price of oil down. Not good news for our friends in Saudi Arabia. But more importantly, the switch in currency would deal a severe blow to the U.S. dollar, which foreign countries including Japan and China have begun slowly phasing away from in favor of a more financially stable portfolio of currencies. Mutual interests between S.A. and the U.S. were served by invading Iraq. And they're still being served by keeping most of the oil in Iraq in the ground as it escalates in value year after year. The current rhetoric about attacking Iran is also of mutual benefit. The U.S. has to honor its promise to protect Saudi Arabia from potential threats like Iran. Iran opened its first oil exchange in February 2008. It also wants to trade oil for euros, not dollars. The administration has been itching to attack Iran for any reason they can think of. That's why Dick Cheney insisted the N.I.E. showing Iran's nuclear ambitions being deserted in 2002. He sat on it for almost a year before it became public, deflating the reason Bush gave for attacking Iran in the first place. Bush continued to try and discredit that report but it was futile. The fact that Iran has been cooperating with the IAEA on all inspections and U.S. raised suspicions. In March 2008, the IAEA found no credible evidence that suggested Iran was hiding or building or planning on weaponizing a nuke. The U.S. continues to raise suspicion which the IAEA continues to question Iran about and it leaves the issue open and unresolved, and sanctions are imposed.

The threat of nukes in Iran isn't working out as Bush and Cheney had hoped. So they've tried a few different things. One was in late January, a potential "gulf of tonkin" like event, in which Iranian speed boats approached a U.S. naval destroyer in the Strait of Hormuz and allegedly threatened to blow up the destroyer. Fortunately, the public was paying attention and questioned the validity of the claim. Long story short, there was no such threat. Interestingly, the administration started talking about how Iran was the real enemy in Iraq.

Follow the logic train and it leads directly into an attack on Iran and another spike in oil prices. And gas prices.

Peak oil, or the end of the era of cheap oil, has certainly exacerbated all this and we're seeing what history will call the resource wars.

Is Obama right about rising gas prices being related to Washington. Absolutely. While it's true that they were bound to rise anyway, had Gore been elected President in 2000, oil would never be at 119 dollars a barrel and our investment in alternative energy sources would have been 500 billion, not a few pennies, and we'd be 8 years ahead of the game. The only problem with our solar and wind technology is that it hasn't been invested in and deployed on the kind of large scale that would make an immense difference. The alternative energy industry would have been and still could be the next bull market in the U.S. if we get off our butts and lead the race to discovery.

all bull.

where would your argument be without the war in Iraq?

there is no decline or shortage of oil on the market the last 5 years.

yet prices keep going up.
reasons are many ,
the fall of the dollar,but most important, oil must remain at this price level and was brought there to ensure this country can borrow back enough money to pay its bills.

SPQR:

Just saw your posts. Please let me clarify. The problem with fuel-cells is that they all utilize hydrogen, but hydrogen does not exist in nature on this planet. It is always bound to some other element, such as carbon forming hydrocarbons. Methanol, like oil, is a hydrocarbon.

Hydrocarbons can undergo a high-capacity process called 'reforming' where heat (generated by burning guess what?) is used to separate the hydrogen from the carbon. Problem here is that too much energy is consumed in releasing the hydrogen, and the carbon combines with oxygen to form greenhouse gases to boot! Some direct hydrocarbon (methanol) fuel-cell technologies exist but these still produce greenhouse gases as a by-product.

Yes. Almost all of the hydrogen on this planet is bound in water. Electrolysis is a highly energy inefficient means of obtaining that hydrogen. The reason solar cells are desirable for this purpose (along with wind, etc.) is that they are green technologies which all use the sun (even the wind is sun powered). The last thing we would want is to burn coal to produce the electricity for electrolyzing water, for example.

"Is the US population really like a group of children that won't do something responsible unless they feel like they are being watched by their parents (the Fed)?"

Look, the "Fed" is us. And yes there are lots of folks in the USA that need us to tell them that they can't drive a gas hog SUV or compensator pickup just so they can think they are impressing their friends and neighbors. The dumb asses that do so drive the price of fuel up for all of us.

We can wait for $5.00 per gallon gas to drive the dumb asses from their gas needless hogs, or we can slap some sense into them by imposing CAFE standards which the sluts in the USA Congress have been unwilling to do, for fear of losing their automotive and oil industry johns.

Yes, there are lots of folks who will bankrupt themselves, through promiscuous credit card debt and home equity loans so they can buy gas hogs they really can't afford, not to mention the boat, personal water craft, snowmobiles, and etc.

Let's face it, about half the population of the USA are dumb asses. It's the same half that continues to believe that Iraq and al Queda were in league, because Cheney tells them so, and that Iraq was involved in the 9-11 attacks.

So yes, there are folks who need the rest of us to tell them they must behave in socially and economically responsible ways, as there behavior costs us economically and environmentally.

I think the point is pretty clear. The United States hasn't had an energy policy that prepared us for the what is the obvious natural outcome that we have now.

Supply and demand - simple. It was entirely predictable that oil consumption would continue to go up, not only here in the U.S., but globally. It was entirely predictable that at some point a conflict in the middle east would disrupt oil supplies. The policy we've had is to do nothing except try and maintain the status quo. For example, no increase in fuel efficiency standards for 30 YEARS!!! We're behind China - my God, CHINA!!! - in fuel efficiency standards.

And it isn't even just the price of gas at the pump - we spend BILLIONS and BILLIONS (I'm channelling Carl Sagen) of dollars to subsidize oil, go to war to defend our "national interests" (oil), have bases in the middle east and numerous other resources dedicated solely to oil. My goodness, if we just spent one tenth of that money over the last 15 years developing alternative fuel technologies and putting an infrastructure in place to support it, we'd be exporting our new technologies to the world and sitting pretty by now.

Why isn't that happening? That's a key question. Who's blocking it? You figure out which entities like things just the way they are, and you have your answer. Hint, they have a lot of money, and they give it to politicians who then support whatever policies they want... like tax breaks for 'alternative energy research'. Yeah, right. And, let's set a 'goal' to reduce our consumption of petroleum - by 2025. Boy howdy, that's fast!

Gimme a break. Obama is calling it like it is. You can't expect millions of individuals, many of which have no idea about economics or geopolitical politics, to sit back and think "gee, maybe sometime in the next 5-10 years, China's economy may boom so much that with their huge population that it could actually drive up the cost of oil around the world. Do you really think the average Jane or Joe is reading the CIBC report? Of course not. It is the job of elected officials to represent us in managing our communities and nation successfully. When they don't, they should be replaced by someone who will. The Clinton's and McCain's in our government have been around long enough to do something, and they haven't. Next up, Obama.