Bush's parting gift?Follow

do they set prices for ALL of the other diamond companies? i know very little about them.

Um... Except for one little bitty problem. Right now, and likely for at least the next 20-30 years, burning oil via a combustion process is by far the most cost efficient method for generating work/power. It is the key problem with most of the alternative energy arguments. They cannot compete with oil on an open market.

That's not to say that putting them into the market doesn't still have value, and certainly does not remove the value to research into those alternatives. But anyone who thinks that we can somehow magically replace oil with alternatives in a global sense needs their head examined. We can augment current oil consumption with alternatives, taking an economic hit in the process. But the reality is that if the cartels decide they want to sell X barrels of oil this year for Y price, that's how many they will sell and that's the price. And the global market will buy that oil because it's cheaper then generating power via any other alternative means (except perhaps for nuclear power, but that's typically used for different applications).

Given that we live in a country that refuses to build nuclear power plants, we're basically stuck burning oil and coal for the bulk of our power needs. Fortunately, we've got a boatload of coal. The oil is the problem, and that's why gas prices are so high. But they could likely double and gasoline would *still* be a more cost effective solution for most applications then any currently competitive alternative. You can't win a price war against oil right now.

The discrepancy between the cost effectiveness of oil and other alternatives was worse in the 1970s then it is today. Why do you think we hear progressively more and louder arguments for adopting alternatives today? It's because as the cost of oil increases and the technology to use alternatives advances, that gap has gotten to where we can actually see how we could use alternatives. They're still more expensive, but we're getting there.


If we'd stopped dealing with OPEC back then, we'd possibly be a third world country today. Certainly, the USSR would control most of the world. Because the only way we could have come close to meeting our own energy demands would have been by massively utilizing every local resource we had. And I don't know if it would have been enough. You talk like we'd just have been in a bit of a rut for 5 or 10 years, but it really doesn't work that way. It would have taken at least that long just to get back to where we were. Our rate of advancement would have been retarded due to having increased the cost literally of everything. Thus, we'd have continued to fall behind where we should have been.

Maybe things would have worked out, but what would have been the point? You can't magically replace oil with something you don't have. We don't have viable alternatives today. And just stopping using oil doesn't make them appear, and certainly wouldn't have made them appear back then. The rate of technological advancement does not increase if we stop buying oil from OPEC. It would arguably decrease, thus making it take *longer* to develop those alternatives.


The best and fastest way to adopt said alternatives is *not* to work to curtail oil use today, but to make the most use of oil/coal reserves today in order to build and maintain a healthy economy with enough "extra" to spend on the technology needed for the alternatives. If we cripple our economy trying to do this faster/sooner, we remove the very ability to achieve the alternative energy technologies we'll need. This is honestly one of the points about alternative energy that I really don't get. There's absolutely zero value in reducing current use of oil today from an alternative energy standpoint. Doubly so when you consider the problem from a global perspective.


If a society produces just enough power to feed their own citizens, then they have nothing left to develop alternatives, right? You have to have "extra" left over to develop new tech. Artificially making todays energy sources more expensive is harmful to any ultimate goal of moving to alternative renewable energy sources. You just need to be patient...

gbaji so you are saying that due to the control of oil, and btw the US does not control it OPEC does, we are a 1st world nation, and thus by not controlling the oil, again we do not control the oil OPEC does, we would be a 3rd world country.

now that has to be the most ignorant thing you have ever said. i respect your posts, but that was just flat out DUMB dude.

You realize that "There hasn't been a major oil spill from an offshore well since 1969" isn't what you said, right?

For what it's worth, I'm largely in support of off-shore drilling.

I'm a big liberal and I'm still for offshore drilling and nuclear power, so there!

Also, going solar on a house-by-house basis looks interesting, if I had a house instead of an inner-city apartment, I'd definitely look into it.

It's either spend the money on that or invest it

Invest it if you think energy costs will be flat. You'd do better than 25% over 20 years in a savings account.

Wrong direction, champ.

ANWR is already preserved. You need to make a compelling argument for why it shouldn't be.