Nice, Jeremy.

And timely, with Bush cutting energy research funds:

"Bush's latest budget called for a reduction in inflation-adjusted dollars for energy R&D over the next five years. That needs to be changed." [Business Week 8/2/04]

Drives me nuts.

Drives me nuts.

It's gonna be a pain in the rump, quite literally, for us Americans to be riding bicycles all around sprawling suburbs. To me, though, that is in some ways a beautiful picture.
My advice: invest in scooter companies and make your next car a VW turbo diesel...they can run on reconstituted cooking oil (here's the science).

You have every right to sound like a doomsayer. The problem is real, and it's not going away this time. There is no viable alternative except to offset some oil-based energy generation with nuclear power. And I do mean fission. Fusion is not on the horizon. More short-sightedness on the part of our brave leaders. As for transportation, that's another ballgame entirely. It's a mess.

There's a bit more to the oil supply side of things than many people realise. Sure the supplies are starting to run down, but only those supplies that are viable to extract from the ground AT THE CURRENT PRICE.

There are locations around the world with plentiful oil supplies, where it is uneconmical to extract them at current prices.

What this boils down to is, the world will NOT run out of oil any time soon (thousands of years at current useage) but the price will need to rise to reflect the complicated process required to get this oil out of the ground

There are many untapped reserves here in the US (ANWR, Gulf of Mexico, etc.). There is also oil shale, which I believe can be converted into crude oil, at a much higher cost however.

By the time we "run out" of oil, we'll have perfected inexpensive fuel-cell vehicles. That covers land transportation. (Air transport is trickier, but we could always go back to trains, buses, and ships in a pinch. Not as fast, but it still gets the job done.)

Coal reserves are much more plentiful than oil reserves. Also, wind and hydro are being used more and more. And pebble-bed nuclear tech offers a better way to harness the atom for power. So, non-transportation energy needs can be met in a post-oil world as well.

When energy costs go up, however, overall inflation rises. This will harm the global economy. (But then, the Kyoto Treaty would hurt the global economy as well, since it also raises energy costs.)

In short, this is a problem, but a manageable one, thanks to new technologies. Chicken Littles need to take a valium or something.

The Athabasca Tar Sands are finally starting to kick with oil, and we do have lots of coal.

Using either/both, though, increases air pollution (think sulfur, both in the air and in huge quantities that we can't handle now) and global warming (carbon dioxide).

With research, some of these problems can be ameliorated, perhaps solved, but Bush is cutting research.

We can't just continue going on saying "it will all work out" because that's the way to ensure it won't.

Sticking to fossil fuels exclusively the problem, not the solution.

I think we agree here, Hal.

I want vastly more money spent on research of fuel-cells and wind-power and hydro-power.

Of course, so did Bush. Until the Senate blocked his energy bill because it would (gasp!) allow drilling in ANWR...

Save a few antelope, screw the American consumer. It's the Democrat way!

The energy bill totally sucks in a totally bipartisan way. ANWR drilling is just a minor part of the problems with it.

Look into its details and you're likely to agree, RJ. It's Congress in its usual form.