Peak Oil News and Message Boards

As the price of oil and gasoline continue their upward trend, the natives are getting restless demanding a quick fix to the situation. Politicians are catering to their anger and frustration saying anything and everything to try to calm down the masses (and perhaps win an election). The sad truth that most of us here on PO.com knows is that there is not a damn thing anyone can do to stop oil prices in an Open Market. Short of killing off all users of said oil/energy, thus killing off demand, there is nothing any president or candidate can do, except pander to the masses and let the oil companies laugh all the way to the bank with ever more profits.

Obama, GOP vie for upper hand on energy

Wooing a nation of increasingly angry motorists, President Barack Obama and his Republican rivals are all plunging into gas-pump politics, seeking the upper hand as energy becomes a driving issue in the election campaign.

Polls show less certainty about it all. One survey this month by CBS News and The New York Times found that 54 percent of Americans felt the price of gasoline was something a president could do a lot about while 36 percent said it was beyond his control. And a recent Washington Post/ABC poll found 50 percent thought the Obama administration could reasonably do something to bring down gas prices, while 45 percent felt the recent rapid rise has been beyond White House control.

The point is that the slight majority are still ignorant to the facts and market mechanics, and you only need the majority to win an election.

You sort of imply that democracy is not the right "mechanism" to deal with resource depletion?

Btw, they're calling it ineptocracy: A system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

pstarr, I assure you, my intention was not to imply anything.

But in a way the free market has a great solution to high oil prices, it is - wait for it: High prices. A brilliant solution, sort of.

Modern democracy is in a way part of the great cheap-energy-bubble. People can vote for a lot of nice goodies to come floating in their direction. In an inflating bubble, that is. Not so when energy gets expensive. You can't vote energy into existence. Was that what you meant?

I think that this is talking about a "free market" approach that is working in a "democracy" of sorts. It surely is NOT talking about a centralized and controlled resource.

Tragedy of the commons

The "tragedy of the commons" is one way of accounting for overexploitation.

The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was described in an influential article titled "The Tragedy of the Commons", written by ecologist Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Well unfortunately there is no free market, that is a myth and after Gore really won the presidency and Bush did not step down, the US anyway is a long way from a democracy. In fact we are carefully protected from democracy.

Democracy is ten hungry cannibals voting on who gets to be supper. The USA is a Representative Republic, unfortunately the representatives are not doing the right thing for the voters, they are doing the right thing to retain their own power.

I think a lot of people know something's wrong. They all think fracking nat gas is going to save us however. They are waiting for their leaders to come up with some miracle energy source so they won't have to change their lifestyle at all. I think we may get a little more natural gas, but the quantities aren't going to make up for what we are losing from going over the sweet crude peak. There are going to be a lot of angry voters this November, and they think that if the Republicans win there will be more oil magically appearing. They will be disabused of that notion quickly, but they don't know that yet.

Then when the new guy can't make oil magically appear at $2.50 a gallon there will be real trouble.

At least the election gives them the illusion of some kind of control.

pstarr wrote:

Revi wrote:There are going to be a lot of angry voters this November, and they think that if the Republicans win there will be more oil magically appearing. They will be disabused of that notion quickly, but they don't know that yet.

Then when the new guy can't make oil magically appear at $2.50 a gallon there will be real trouble.

At least the election gives them the illusion of some kind of control.

That "illusion of control" in the wrong hands (another clueless birthright republican president--GW then, Romney now) will surely lead us into more pointless war;"Operation Iran Freedom" (Feel free to photoshop Romney here)

You mean like the past pointless war in Libya, the future pointless wars in Syria and Iran, and the continued pointless war in Afghanistan that Obama is backing? Are these the pointless wars that you worry about?

pstarr wrote: Libya, Syria, Iran?

You forgot what Obama calls the "good war" in Afghanistan.

You know.....the country with an actual war that is going on right now?

pstarr wrote:..... rich boy......

And you are a poor boy.

Gosh...life is tough. Try to man up.

Now lets get back to discussing the topic.

pstarr wrote:Who invaded Afghanistan?

Who escalated the war in Afghanistan in 2009? Who thinks it is such a "good war" that our soldiers should stay there for another three years until the end of 2014?

Come on ----- you can get it if you think really hard. Think! THINK!

Who could possibly be stupid enough to think his strategy is going to win the war in Afghanistan?

HINT: His initials are B-O.

pstarr wrote:If you were a reasoning anti-war anti-imperialist (or even a ole' timey republican isolationist)...

If you even knew what decade it was you'd realize it isn't Bush's fault we are still in Afghanistan----its 100% Obama's decision to keep prosecuting this meaningless war.

So much for the PO "new attitude"