The descent from Hubbert's peak will be a painful fall indeed. Where is the visionary leadership needed to conserve and convert to a renewable energy economy?

What decades?

You mean the decades where everyone dies off from starvation?

Or maybe the decades where we try to figure out how to make stuff without plastic and petrochemicals...

or is it the decades where we expend copious gobs of the oil we have to kill the people living on top of the oil we need for next year...

Economies wont exist as we know them, throw out all the old formulas, throw out all the old rules.

Some of the blinkered little proles who read this post will probably think you're being alarmist or silly...they'll look back and wonder how you understated this so badly...

live for now...

Maybe we should re-watch the "Mad Max" movies to prepare us for what is to come.

I can remember one of the first things that dirt bag reagan did when he came into office-cancel all of Jimmy Carter's alternative energy programs. This was a purposeful act to keep our economy dependent on Saudi oil, this is simply a fact. I find it hard to believe that 25 years of continued research wouldn't have yielded discoveries that would have moved our economy from one dependent on cheap oil. No one seems to want to remember what reagan did, but much of this can be laid at his feet.

National security requires that all energy-related patents, in fact all patents held by oil companies, be immediately published and declared to be in the public domain. Watch the alternative energy possibilities soar!

Geez Nathan can you get your underwear anymore in a knot?

SlcInCny, That's a very twisted view of history. Carter's projects, being true sons of their father, were losers. Hostages came home and oil flowed when Ronald Reagan became President.

Larry C., That's a twisted conspiratorial view. Patents are already published. That's part of how to get a patent. There are no secrets.

Nathan, Twisted AND chicken little.

Yeah, Smitty, the hostages came home because Reagan conspired with a hostile foreign government to pay them off if they held the hostages until after the election so Carter would lose. Then, down the road, we end up with Iran-Contra.

Way to bring responsibility and morality back to public life, Ronnie, you WWII-avoiding, divorced hypocrite.

Smitty, wrote:

"SlcInCny, That's a very twisted view of history. Carter's projects, being true sons of their father, were losers. Hostages came home and oil flowed when Ronald Reagan became President."

This is a completely twisted entry, and ridiculous. As usual a freeper making a statement with absolutely no back up. The solar projects Carter had the gov't fund were in their infancy, imagine 25 years of continued research. God, what an idiot.

sad and scary. maybe it's time folks started looking more seriously into turkey oil (another article at Discovery is subscription only, but also seems to appear in its entirety here)

Carter's alternative energy projects were a mixed bag. Oil shale projects, particularly in Colorado had the probablity of long term environmental costs far exceeding those of conventional oil extraction. The wind and photovoltaic investments were expensive, although they are finally starting to have commercial viability. Finally, the most obvious source of energy, conservation, is extremely competitive with any alternative energy energy source. IMHO, the obvious approach to energy conservation is taxation of oil or other consumptive energy resources.

Theoretically, the best way for government to promote conservation of non-renewable resources would be to make sure they're owned, and there's a transparent, liquid market in them. If something is scarce and non-renewable, it's going to become more scarce as it's used up, which means it's going to get more valuable. If it's going to get more valuable, that means people can make money by buying it and not letting it be used until later, i.e. they have an economic incentive to conserve.

As it is, oil in the ground is not owned. Land is owned, and rights to remove oil are leased. No one even knows how much oil is in the ground, nor where a substantial part of it is.

Also theoretically, the incentive to conserve for later use is a separate issue from the externalities associated with using a resource now versus later versus not at all. That's not necessarily true in practical terms either, in the way the decisions are actually made.

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