About Venezuela's Chavez -- he has for years been one who pushed ever higher oil prices.   His little effort in the N.E. U.S. is small change compared to what he has made from those same people over the years due to his pricing strategy.

If oil companies were finding new oil reserves with their recent profits I think the public would be a bit more understanding.  Instead they give Raymond a 400 million dollar goodbye present and the public is understandably PO'd.  That's a serious amount of cash even today.

This issue isn't about reasonable vs: unreasonable profit.  It's about how that profit should be invested.  What does an oil company do with a windfall when their geologists haven't found large new oil deposits in years?  The give it as a nice going away present to an ex-CEO.  Talk about a waste of money!

The public has been indoctrinated with the idea that if they just let the "free market" do its thing then everything will come out allright.  Even the average american idiot driver can sense the problem with taking their gas money and giving it to some retiring CEO rather than investing it in new exploration.  Even it the results were dry holes, XOM could at least justify the effort as a reasonable use of money.

I really think TOD contributors have gotten caught up in the aroma of their own arguments - peak oil and all that - to the exclusion of a perfectly reasonable outrage on the part of the driving public about how the fuel premium they are now paying is being used.

Is that outrage being dealt with politically in an appropriate manner?  Of course not!  When was the last time public outrage was channeled by  a fair-minded political intelligence?

Peak oil and public outrage are two separate issues.

The public outrage component is focused on the failure of the mechanism of our free market economy to provide the stability americans think is their due.  It's a rage against the propaganda they've been fed for years.  And that rage is fueled by a deep, pervasive addiction to all our transportation machines.  I'm sure that's what Cheney was alluding to when he said the American Way of Life is not negotiable.

Next time you take a drive down a street filled with retail commerce in any of the modern American suburbs or exurbs, entertain yourself by  determining what percentage of those businesses are directly involved with either cars or motorcycles or boats.  I refer to repair shops, tire shops, body shops, auto dealerships - everything.  The message of expensive energy is the death knell of the American Dream.  Hilda Hummer and Dickie Dodge know that subliminally and underneath the rage they're scared out of their, for lack of a better word, wits.

Next time you are in a position to eavesdrop in a public place, listen to the conversations.  If your experience is what mine has been, most are about cars, trucks and motorcycles.

The scope of change coming to America is just unbelievable.  We're about to lose our position in the world as well as having to replace a good deal of our inner psychic life with something not nearly so nice.

I was raised on a farm.  About the time I was ready to go out into the fields with my dad he traded in his horses for an Oliver tractor.  He never looked back.  I never, ever heard him talk about the good ole days of horses.  That almost everyone in America can afford a car and gasoline is the touchstone of our freedom.  Just as my father wouldn't give up his tractor, few in any country I know of would happily give up the freedom of a car once they've experienced it.  We're not plants, we're animals and the car is our freedom to move.

My conclusion is that the only way for the political system to keep a lid on this situation is to show every aggressive instinct consistent with getting as much oil for this country as possible - and to hell with the consequences.  People who have the "wise government leading us into a new paradigm" delusion need to quote some examples.  Cuba is about the only one I can think of and Cuba was forced to go cold turkey over a period of months.  Castro had no choice but to decentralize in a hurry or his country would have imploded.  I don't think the US will go that path.  Different country, different social system, different intelligence level.  Cuba has an intelligent, literate population.

Yes I believe oil demand has permanently outstripped supply - at least until the next depression.  Whether that's "peak oil" or not is irrelevant, really.  What's important is that the world's Railroad Commission (OPEC) no longer has much reason to exist.  There is no swing producer and demand will bid the price of energy up to whatever level it can.  What price that may be no one yet knows.

Realistically there ain't much to do about it except batten down the hatches and get ready for a big storm.  Dinosaurs don't have the option to wish themselves into mammals.

True. Back in 1992 when I was a contractor for British Airways, one of their internal auditors told me that management decided what the annual profit was going to be; the figures were reworked to give that profit figure. This surprised me at the time; now it doesn't.