Dear Nate,

Thanks for your lucid and informative presentations. I alwasy look forwrard to reading your pieces.

Here are just a couple of general points that occured to me.

You mentioned some of the indirect costs relating to oil production. One really big one that currently costs billions and is rising almost exponentially, is, the military costs of ensuring US access to the world's remaining oil reserves. If one factors in these "indirect costs" one could easily argue that oil already, roughly, costs over a hundred dollars a barrel! However, this is a pretty radical way of looking at the situation and controversial.

I operate with something I call "internal" and "external" costs. The internal is the "price" the oil/energy costs to produce and what "we" pay for it directly. The external costs are everything else! That is, the "price we pay" that we don't see or choose to recognise. It's the price society pays collectively, but which somehow doesn't figure in the everyday price we pay for a product. Capitalism has a tendancy to "hide" the true costs of a product, transfering the real "price" from the individual producer to society, often with a substantial time-lag which means that most of us don't even register that it's happening.

Two examples of this are atomic power, which has enormous "hidden" costs; the massive outlay for de-commisioning reactors and the problem of waste-management.

The second, an more controversial, is the gigantic cost of health care for the thousands of wounded, maimed and injured US soldiers coming home from Iraq. Over a fify years period were talking about several trillion dollars.

Leaving that aside, is "growth", with all that concept implies, part of the solution or part of the problem? Aren't we set for some collosal political problems is growth begins to slows down? Yes, we are! If the cake isn't getting bigger and bigger all the time, will we be satisfied with the size of our slice in relation to other social groups?

Looking at the twin problems of Peak Oil and Climate Change, it would appear that in the future "economic growth" will/should occur in the developing world and Not in ours. How will we grow then? I would contend that all our "growth" should/must come not from increased consumption of energy, but from a massive, root and branch, fundamental, re-configuration of how we use energy. Put simply, we have to stop wasting energy on crap and save energy to use on what's really essential for our society. Now, this is easy to write and understand in theory, but far more difficult to figure out how it could actually be implimented in practice.

It means, as far as I can see, that we have to start asking fundamental and rather scary questions about the structure and nature of our society and how and why and who makes the choices. Do we let the "market" choose for us or do we take control?

If we are living in a "market democracy" do we change that system? Is a "market democracy" in fact "democratic"? If it isn't how and what do we replace/modify it with?

Sorry there are so many questions and no real answers. I'm still working on them!