Wouter:

Most Americans think of themselves as capitalists, but of course there are many social programs here, the Interstate Highway System not the least of them.

Regarding energy prices, not just gasoline, I'd like to see them regulated by the Federal Reserve System to reflect future needs. The current free market system just reflects demand of the moment and very near future. Surely we should be planning much further ahead.

This link was posted by jbecker earlier. I think you should give it a look.

http://www.energybulletin.net/12751.html

I see your point.

I also beleive that there isn't much potential to avoid the hardship. Afterall, this turn around is going to happen. Either in a gradual way of after a major upset. The energy crisis is going to be one of such upsets.

Politicians of course figure that the storm will not arrive till after the time they need to clear out. Seems the really poor and politicians think alike. Week-to-week.

I'm just happy that in my area we already had the transition; so we will not be hit as hard.

Wouter

Of course. But it seems that there is little time left to do that, better hurry or that will happen by force.
The current system is NOT SUSTAINABLE: cheap oil will become not available in a short time.
Other wars will not solve the problem at all (worldwide demand vs worldwide offer).
So, US has cornered itself in this bad position and a lot of people (not only Mr Bubba but also lawmakers and politicians) do not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation and the need to act quickly.

I am personally very worried about a financial crash triggered by a jump on oil prices (>100$/barrel).
And I am only talking economy here, not environment. But actually everything work together.

I'm just guessing, but probably the only cure for poverty is work, which is why we need a sound energy policy!

Bubba doesn't have to be smart or well "edikated" to be greedy. As long as there are jobs available he'll go to work, for the most part, and snoop around for the best pay. In this way he progresses from Bubba to Middlebubba (that would be me )where he finds social programs stop and he's more or less on his own as a bona fide working American!

Wouter:

I don't know how things work in Europe, but here we are merchandised from birth to believe we need everything under the sun, I call it "capitalistic brainwashing"! So, we go in debt up to our eyeballs and work like hell to pay it all off, I call that the "great American indenture". Well, somewhere around age 50, while we are at our maximum earnings, we get it all paid off and I call that "the great American dream realized"!

All this works very well, as long as jobs are plentiful. Heretofore, we've had an abundance of cheap energy to fuel this rosey little scenario, but those days are rapidly growing to a close, which brings us full circle to why we need a sound energy policy! I'm sorry to be obtuse, but down here in bubba-land that's just how things are.

Re the Oil thing. Do a search on Google for "Peak Oil" and there are massive discussions about it.

Oil is a resource that we are using up. As the price per barrell increases on the market; Brent / NY then then oil that was not economic to extract becomes so. The industry is now talking about moveable "ship based" platforms that can tap into fields that may only have a life of a few years instead of looking to fields with 10's of years.

There is a supply vs demand problem and this will continue until fuel consumption becomes a criteria for the choice of vehicle. In most of the EU, MPG is a criteria for the purchase of a car. I don;t feel that is is so in the USA.

In the past I was shocked to read about the import duty's on EU cars in the US. Is this to protect the US motor industry. I believe that the US does not see MPG (yet) as a criteria for the buying of cars.

In the UK (and I assume the rest of the EU) any car that is returning an average 8 MPG would be a super car. Our Petrol (and Drv) prices are such that such a car would not (and could not) be considered as a "every day driver".

Perhaps high fuel prices in the USA would "help" to move the US motor market to move to a more MPG driven choice.

I have a theory that the US is going through things that Europe (and other countries) went through many years ago. It's just that the US is a younger country. I'm simplifying my theory, but I think y'all will get the point.

I'm afraid we'll just have to get the sh!t whaled out of US to learn the lesson. I mean, it doesn't seem to be bothering nearly enough people over here that our boys are getting killed to protect our oil resources (she says, ducking). My husband is in the oil biz, and he told me that at a company planning meeting he was given to understand that Iraq is estimated to possibly hold something like 25% of world oil, if I recall. I'm not sure on that total. I do remember being surprised at the amount, but then of course I made the connection as to exactly why Bush went in there. The cynicism of our politicians just freaks me out.

A noticeable thing:

All of the forum members who were very active (and nasty) at selling Bush policies these last years are suddenly absent.

Is it because they feel like us that the [censored] is going to hit the fan shortly?

I didn't vote for him, but at least there was an election. Though I doubt the result will be pro American! Might even be more terrorist oriented. Time will tell.

I think we are our own worst enemy regarding energy, and the solutions are to be had domestically. If you believe, as I do, that terrorism is funded with oil money; then witholding that money is imperative! It is a sickening thought that buying up old gas burners here might be even more effective than dropping bombs there!

Buying middleeast oil is sort of like selling scrap metal to Japan . . . after Pearl Harbor!

I'm not too sure that European is way down that road as well. At least in the Netherlands there is a noticeable change if you compare current times with those of the early 90's. I personally hope we can avoid the greater excesses but I'm not very confident about that. We're still doing better but not really do well in this respect.

Wouter

If I may jump into this long non-sailing discussion late, I would like to make a couple of points that seem to have been left behind in the flurry of thoughts going off into numerous interesting directions.

Capitalism versus Socialism: I don't think you can get away from a basic truth that the more you want someone or something (government, for instance) to do for you, the more freedom of independent action you will give up. Any good society will take care of its vulnerable citizens; even barbaric societies did this to differing extents. But the more these support programs proliferate, the more people will be happy to depend on them; not everyone is motivated by the work ethic. Way back, Benjamin Franklin said that we should help the poor, but not make them so comfortable that they want to stay in that condition (I'm paraphrasing). The beauty of Capitalism is that it appeals to human being's self interest, which is more reliably stronger than human being's altruistic instincts. Since Capitalism is basically amoral, it must be coupled with a strong rule of law to reign in excesses. In support of the above very brief theme, I offer some general statistics. US economic growth rate is consistently higher than Europe's. US unemployment rate is way below Europe's (Europe varies from 6 to 9% while the US is under 5%). Opinion poles show Europeans much less optimistic about their future than US citizens. This attitude may be why Europe's birth rate (among ethnic Europeans) is not sustaining itself. The gowing social support payments necessary from years of social welfare and the aging baby boom generation is creating an impending economic crisis more dangerous than our "boomer" social security crisis.

If government gets out of people's way (except for enforcing proper rules of fair play, so to speak), one sees the inventiveness of people unleashed. Ireland's economic boom over the last 20 years serves as a good example. In the US, I am constantly amazed at seeing how people will find the smallest need and find a way to make a living filling that. The inventiveness of these entrepeneurs never ceases to amaze me. Now, before I get slammed with examples of how this idea is perverted or corrupted in the US, I didn't claim it was perfectly functioning here, just better than in many other places in the world. We have many distortions of the free market here and some lead to real economic problems. In general, though, barriers to entrepeneurism are much lower in the US than in Europe and that's a good thing.

Regarding oil: The Alberta (Canada) oil sands contain more oil reserves than currently exist in Saudi Arabia. At $2.50 a gallon, it is now becoming economically viable to extract and market. We have in the US vast deposits of shale oil under ground. It can't be accessed by open pit mining like the oil sands, but there is a commercial test operation (to test on a commercial scale) going on out west whereby steam is injected into these deposits and the oil is "cooked" out of the shale. When deleted, the deposit is back filled with water and the whole operation occurs underground. These deposits are vast, close to the level of Saudi Arabia. Last, but very much not least, we have, at current consumption rates, enough coal in the US to fuel our fleet of vehicles for 500 years. This is from methanol extracted from coal.

The US should mandate that the auto makers achieve flex fuel capability on their fleet within 2 to 3 years. It takes only a sensor to determine the composition of the fuel and adjust the mixture accordingly and a protected fuel system (methanol and ethanol are corrosive). This mandate should require flex capability for both methanol (from coal) and ethanol (from corn, etc) which is harder to accomplish, but well within current technology. By now everyone's seen the E85 ads, so the ethanol lobby is in full swing, but we need full flexibility.

The point of all this is to not have a world economic crisis regarding the oil economy while the world economy has transitions beyond its complete dependency on petroleum. We need 50 to 100 years for this process and its readily available. The other, maybe more important point, is that we need to stop funding the Islamic terrorists. Much of the money all countries send to the mid east is used to fund Islamic fundamentalism which is the source of inspiration for Islamic terror activities. As a business man I marvel at cost of goods for a barrel of oil, $5; selling price fob mid east, $60; profit $55 or 1100%. This dependency also coops the western world from properly reacting to terror activities or terror supporting states.

To summarize (and therefore, oversimplify), we should support the vulnerable; create a minimum safety net for the poor, but not one that makes them too comfortable; drive the poor back into productivity, get government out of people's lives as much as possible; enforce fair laws; unleash the inventiveness of humans in the economic sphere; develop alternative fuels quickly, especially the technologies with good return-on-investment capabilities; send less money to the mid east and keep it in our own countries; and sail more rather than burn fossel fuels.

Davidn
H20 781
If Winter's here, can Spring be far behind?

yes, this is all getting out of hand BUT...
The larger problem is not our boomer crisis... it is the healthcare crisis that will screw the US long before oil or soc security does.

In what the highway system is a social program???

I'm sure many can tell from my posts that I'm aging a little bit. I've seen all western nations just throw away 25 years of development time since the first oil crisis. Nor did the magical free (capitalist) market or private entrepeneurship do what the public sector (state) avoided doing. If anything it did the direct opposite, in the 70's we didn't have SUV or hummers. I'm sceptical, very sceptical. I never had much faith in the private sector I admit but in those 25 years I've seen nothing to rock my earlier conviction, this scares me. The private sector will do a few things well and development for public good is certainly NOT one of them. Often there is simply no (good) money in it and share holders don't like companies balancing on the bankruptcy line. Most often only the state can take the risk or make the expenses; afterall the state can not go bankrupt and has a garanteed income by virtue of taxes.





Personally I think that "freedom" and "freedom of independent action" are in themselfs overrated. I can't eat it, it won't keep me warm and it won't clean up the environment around me of pollution or other health risks like crime.

It is a nice rallying cry and by God a decent minimum of freedom is definately worth dying for but total freedom or even something close to it is pretty meaningless and often just alot of hard work for a meger existance. Ask any settler.

In the end it all comes down to a balancing act of freedom versus public good. Neither should be subservant to the other, that is simply not healthy.






The problem with any system is when it assumes that everybody and anybody will react the same to similar situations. This simply does not hold. A great example are the drugs problems. Sure drug should be banned and thus kept out of general society. But there will always be a group of persons that will fall down in excessive drug use and thus "freedom" themselfs into a life or endless poverty and suffering. Some people simply don't have enough sense of self interest to keep the out of trouble. Nearly always these people end up in crime as their enslavement to the drug is a great leverage. One of the best things done by the (socialist) Dutch government was to setup up state controlled methodon distribution points were these addicts got their daily shot. The had to report themselfs to local shelters and generally were checked up. Both in activities and for contagious deceases. A hinderance of personal freedom. In these shelters they were given continious opportunity for rehabilitation and they could walk in and out when they wanted. If you walked out then no Methodon for you. Sure it kept these people addicted but then these were never going to kick the habit anyway. It was better to prevent them from allowing an epidemic from developping and keeping them out of the criminal circles really helped getting petty crime down.

Is this an eternal dance with the devil ? You bet, but as long as you kept counting the step and payed attention to the tune then everybody was better off. I like to see entrepeneurs develop a similar program. These things can only be done by the state. And only by one that understands that one size doesn't fit all.






And that is the way that you end up with a prison system that incarcerates more people than all other nations per captita and I even believe that it is more than all other nations combined.

Sure it will work. It is like "the system works of only we allow it to kill" but your society will in general by alot more harsh and agressive.

Being soft in a whimpy thing to do but the statistics may actually endorse such an approach.






This is a conviction, not a fact. Both blocks showed better growth rates at times. I think over the last few months EU grew better than US and before that it was the other way around. So what is "consistently"

In addition ; what does it matte that one area scores 9 % growth while another scores 5 % ? Growth is growth and having more sex also does mean it is better as well ! In many situations it is the quality that counts not the quantity.





How about you guys counting also the employed persons after 6 months ? There is alot of hidden unemployment in the USA, everybody knows this. In europe ALL person are counted not just the ones who are still on government unemployment benefits.

In addition, how bad is it really to have a few % more unemployment ? It is certainly not keeping the Euro exchange rate to the dollar down. Sure, lower will be better, but that doesn't mean that higher is bad.






Opinion poles, PFffww. Highly overrated in my opinion. Opinion poles also show that people believe nuclear wapons were found in Iraq, while this is patently untrue. These things are often better as a measure of general intelligence if not common sense.

The birth rate among ethnic Europeans and it not sustaining itself have far more potent economic and cultural causes; this has been developping over the last few decades. You can't tell me that Europeans have been gloomy about the future ever since, 1960's.

Besides, thank good we have negative population growth overhere. It was beginning to get a little crowded. Population growth would not have been sustainable much longer either.





This is just another utopia. Check the inventiveness in "the projects" for example.





And Ireland is not a social democracy ? Also it didn't get billion of aid from the European union, a socialist project if there is one. This is not an example of a nation getting on top by being left to their own devises and being subjected to pure capitalism.

Remember ; having free markets is not the same as being capitalist.






Ask snoop dog how he started his path to weath.

Before we get into another touch the flag and cry a tear over opportunity and personal responsibily moment here, allow me to state that for each succes story I can point you to many stories showing the opposite. Can it happen, Sure ! Will it happen to everyone or even the majority ? Hell no ! And we all know that.





Yes well we are all doing better then Bangladesh, Dominican republic, Kazachstan, Algeria and what not else. Doing better than many other places in the world still doesn't mean that you are doing better then Europe in general.





You keep telling us, but why exactly ? Cuban victums of Katrina are already back in shape. Poor families in North-Eastern US get heating fuel support form Venezuela instead of their own government. You are one of the few nations to even hand out food stamps, you are the only one doing so in the group of "western nations". Must I go on ?

I'm also a sucker for Bill Gates succes stories and the freedom to start you own business and risk a 67 % failure rate, but how exactly do a handful of great stories help out the larger group of people who fail ? They can't eat these stories, they won't keep them warm, and it certainly doesn't help their kids break out of poverty. Lets face it, if you drop out of high school then you chance at being a succesful entrepeneur are not really promising.





We have enough deuterium in the sea water to fuel fusion reactors for millenia. However, this doesn't mean it is going to be here in time or that it is a solutions to our global energy problem. Also these new deposits will be significantly more expensive to exploit, ergo high fuel prices. And exploitation of these deposits will not solve any problems related to waste.

I never understand how government and even companies are willing to spend billions in development of such new deposits, hoping for future benefits, while the same investments could have created inmediate gains if spend on efficiency improvements.

A great example, How much would it cost to to buy every house hold high efficient lambs ? 100 million homes in the USA ? 10 lambs per house hold ? Cost per lamb, at these quantities, 5 bucks per lamb ? Total investment 5 billion dollars.





Hey, this is government interference ! Something a true capitalist and free market thinker should despise.




35 years has passed since the first oil crisis (political motivated) and absolutely NO gains were made in the USA. Why do still convince ourselfs that this time will be magically different ?

Somebody has to stand up and make a difference. My claim is that only the state can be that somebody.






I think nobody disagrees on that. Our goals are the same, we are actually differing on the way to implement it.


regards,

Wouter

It isn't privately owned. It is owned by the Federal Government.

Wouter:

Whew!! Stop and breathe buddy!

Davidn:

There is significant difference of opinion regarding the total reserves contained within the tar sand and shale deposts. See below.

http://www.energybulletin.net/12751.html

That being said, I'm in virtual agreement with you. My question is how do we take action? Or, should we just wait for the good and bright peoople in government ( there are a great many of them )to do their jobs?

Dealing with any government is the same as dealing with committees; if anything gets done it takes forever and will probably be wrong anyway. Take the initiative and go get it done. Since oil shale and tar sand are a huge investment of time and money, invest in the companies that have a good shot at getting it to market.

Oh yeah, after you've gotten whatever it is successfully completed, someone else will try to take the credit.

I am personality not excited at all by the tar and sand solution. Again, it is about getting more oil, not sparing it. And above all, what is the environemental cost of extracting this oil? It must be nasty, with huge holes and machinery.

Not a solution.

By the way, good post Wouter.

Following this reasoning the US has the biggest and most expensive social program in the World, The US military !

Wouter

And, the very best in the whole wide world!!