Actually, yes, the gloom and doom, at least from the energy point of view, is misplaced.
Yes, we may be nearing the production peak of conventional petroleum- but there are trillions of barrels worth of heavy oil, oil shale and tar sands- tar sand operations in Canada produce oil at $8 per barrel (surely an acceptable cost). The ZECA (Zero Emission Coal Alliance) process (www.zeca.org) offers a way to get the energy out of coal and leave the CO2 and smoke behind- and we have centuries worth of coal . Solar photovoltaic cells decrease in cost, year by year- in California it is starting to look like consumers can actually save money by buying them (we have big rebates and tax credits, but even without them the cost is low enough to get by- especially if oil goes to $100 per barrel). If all else fails, there is always nuclear energy, and a nuclear breeder economy, which in a peaceful world would work just fine.
It's all mismanagement and misallocation of resources, not any sort of real shortage, IMO. Unregulated capitalism is serving us very badly, cutting off lines of promising research, locking us into the oil economy, externalizing their costs by getting our military to invade countries for them. Invading the Mideast is a good way to RESTRICT oil supplies- the real price of crude oil went DOWN during the Clinton administration.
The technological problems of energy production are easily solvable, IMO, by the free market if by nothing else. It is the ignorance and recklessness of the Neocons that endangers us all.
This is from a thread on smirkingchimp.com
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.ph ... ed&order=0
