I’m going to take a page from Steve Broback, and send you over to one of Ben Stein’s recent columns in the New York Times.
I’ve started reading his work recently because I tend to agree with his premise but not his conclusion, and this one is no different.
Stein does an excellent job of explaining why we are in trouble not just as a nation but as a world because of our reliance on oil and oil’s unstable sources:
In my humble view, we are now in a short-term oil bubble. It will pass and correct, as bubbles do. And speculators will make millions, whichever way it goes. But the long run is terrifying. If we are at or past peak oil, if oil states stop or even hesitate to send us the juice, if Canada decides not to fill our needs, we are in overwhelming trouble.
Alright, I’m with you. We’ve got a long term problem here because oil is a finite resource, and as far as we know the cost of extracting it is just going to go up until it does, eventually, run out.
So what do we do?
We need to turn coal into oil into gasoline, to use nuclear power wherever we can, and to brush aside the concerns of the beautiful people who live on coastal pastures (like me). And we need to drill on the continental shelf, even near where movie stars live. This must be done, on an emergency basis. If we keep acting as if the landscape were more important than human life, we will make ourselves the serfs of the oil producers and eventually reduce our country to poverty and anarchy.
…
What?
No, what we need to do is use the economic tools at our disposal—like taxes—to nudge that “invisible hand” in the right direction.
Allowing the cost of oil to rise gradually will give Americans time to adjust their behavior to new energy costs, taxes on gas will provide much needed government funds, much of which can be directed to grants and research that will spur the innovation necessary to create new sources of energy for our cars and homes.
And the high cost of oil will mean that new, cleaner, more sustainable technologies will enter the market at a competitive rate, and like Computers or LCD TVs, new production technology will bring their prices back down to what we’ve been accustomed to paying. Perhaps lower.
And the best part? We’re not just grabbing a spade and poking desperately at the coastline, hoping to get one more round of black gold before mother Earth says: “last call.”
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