Just bunchs of individuals and groups with base motivations which act in loose tacit coordination while still competing between themselves can give the illusion of a SINGLE goal seeking "evil entity".

Maybe there is a little more to it than "just a bunch of individuals".
Suppose you were a Professor of Economics at Yale. (Well maybe not this guy on the right because at least he admits that GW may be responsible for larger hurricanes although he leans against that notion. Click on his picture to read his pdf paper.)

And you are getting a pretty nice paycheck because after all it is "Yale" and most of the people who go to your school can afford to go there without worrying about the "price" of admission.

So what are you going to preach to them? You're going to preach what you think they want to hear (or more to the point what their Mumsy & Old Man want them to hear). They are happy with the Darwinian, Survival of the Economic Superiors Theory that you dish out to them and you are happy with the paycheck and perks. A very cozy relation. Year after year.

Then there are the few wanna-be-rich and talented Mr. Ripley's in your class. They are smart. They will never be super rich. Wrong blood you know. But they will grow up to be the Yergins and Cato Institute wizards of society. They will be the minions to the elites. They will soak up what you preach and dish it back to the elites later on in order to re-validate that which they learned at alma matta. Again, that is going to be a very cozy relation for all involved.

Next, you step down the rungs of society and look at some slob of an engineering professor at MIT. Who are his students and what is he going to teach them --assuming he wants tenure and his cozy niche in society?

So you see that there is a built-in compact in our eductional "institutions". It perpetuates the system. It's not "just" a bunch of accidentally random individuals. It's got history. It's got roots. It is a living and self-perpetuating bio system.

How can the Republicans keep down prices?

"Price" is a human-generated noise signal. It need not have anything to do with physical reality. It is all about how we humans fool ourselves into believing one thing or another. And fools we certainly are.

And is the esteemed NY Times next in line to chime on our PO times?

PO saturated minds want to know.
We bait with our breathes. :-)

Money has value only because we all agree that it has value, and that agreement is balanced on the fact that the expected value is positive--there's more benefit going around than detriment, even if the benefit is disproportionately allocated.  But when prices go up and hunger becomes commonplace, historically what we've seen over and over again is that people abandon money because it no longer works for them.

So, I guess I'm failing to see how money will be good for anything but kindling once Peak Oil really begins to take its toll....

Is that also true of defense contractors and the like getting rich off of death and carnage in the Middle East?  Or of the whole slew of well-known corporate fraudsters in recent years?  Or of those making a killing for virtually nothing via Katrina contracts?  Etc., etc., etc.

There is ample empirical evidence to disprove your free-market-capitalist a priori regarding the benefits to broader society of individuals getting rich.

In my best Michael Douglas voice: "GREED IS GOOD!"

yeah, like investing in Halliburton.

I wasn't suggesting a definitive analysis, just thinking that the price is a generous upper bound for the cost of the oil that went into making it. While there are things that work the other way, labour resources aren't free either, and there is tax... in short the real cost of the oil used to make is probably much lower. If an economist could correct or qualify this statement I would be grateful.

Blocking lanes to reduce congestion is like tightening your belt to lose weight.

"The phenomemon of induced traffic works in reverse as well.  When New York's West Side Highway collapsed in 1973, an NYDOT study showed that 93 percent of the car trips lost did not reappear elsewhere;  people simply stopped driving.  A similar result accompanied the destruction of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway in the 1989 earthquake.  Citizens voted to remove the freeway entirely despite the apocalyptic warnings of traffic engineers.  Surprisingly, a recent British study found that downtown road removals tend to boost local economies, while new roads lead to higher urban unemployment.  So much for road-building as a way to spur the economy."

This study found that 20 percent to 60 percent of driving trips disappeared rather than materializing elsewhere.  Imagine that!

Bottom line:  removing roads DECREASES congestion just as building more roads INCREASES congestion.  This has been proven time and time again.  Remove it and they will disappear.

Well, then why don't we put permanent lane blocks in the freeways in LA?

Excellent cartoon!  The elite predators [bears, wolves?] on the right side are having the 'time of the lives' watching the ignorant lemmings prematurely end their lifetimes!

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

The town I call home has a population of less than 6000. I can cycle to work, year round in less than ten minutes. All the facilities are about a five minute ride from my home and this is true for everybody. I have never seen a traffic jam in a small town. I have seen a traffic jam between small towns and between cities and their satellite communities. Sharing the road with cars and trucks in a small town has been much less stressful for me than in the cities.

The self-sufficiency culture is also stronger in the small towns I've lived compared to the cities. Gardens and fruit trees abound and people actually use and preserve the harvest. We're also embedded in an agricultural area, so local produce and meat is easy to come by. Heck, I spent last evening converting a couple bushels of apples that my neighbour gave me into a year's supply of apple juice.

I've never felt like I needed a gun for protection. Not in a small town. Not in the downtown core of a major city. I like guns just fine (traditional flintlock long rifles being my favourites), and I wouldn't hesitate to use one to protect myself or my family. I've just never felt the need, not even a little.

I'm feeling luckier and luckier to be above the 49th parallel.

Mark (not really in Calgary anymore)

But are we going to be able to cover a fraction of the earths surface to power our civilization.  No....another silver BB, perhaps.

I don't think given current technology, that a silver bullet to replace oil is going to be feasible.  It will have to be silver BBs.

That said, Algae has the advantage over other crop types in that we can grow algae in areas unsuited for traditional crop types.  The vast, uninhabited deserts make an ideal location for this type of production or possibly floating greenhouses built on similar technology as current rigs.  Further Algae has the other advantage of not being a drain on arable lands.  Attaining and providing nutrient rich water is as easy as moving it from the ocean in many cases or tapping into sewage.  Can we afford to cover sections of the earth for our energy needs.  I think yes, provided we choose the right types of sections.

Personally I kind of like the floating greenhouse rigs idea as the ocean water will be immediately available, the rigs can be built in areas of ocean where yearly sunlight has a high yield, and lastly, if the rigs were designed to take advantage of the wave/tidal action the ocean produces, the rigs could be self powered using tidal devices.

With the exercise of knowledge (soil science, plant breeding, appropriate selection and placement of cultivars) we are able to improve modestly on the gifts nature has spent deep time finetuning.

We can also profitably improve our own burning technologies and the institutional arrangements by which we exploit these gifts from nature.  But it is laughable to think we can in a few decades develop superior systems to capture the daily income of solar energy than those nature offers.

Moreover, it is downright foolish to develop a dependence on systems, which require the availability of stored solar, for production and reproduction.  Which is not to say that solar panels and wind machines and the like do not have a small role to play in some places.

Photovoltaics are nice, and stirling even nicer, but we still need energy for storage.

It may be that PV Cells are better than algae at capting the sunlight (wich I doubt) but I can tell you that the price is ever increasing.

Where I come from, I live next to a huge hydro electric power station (well, actually a few hundred km) so PV cell dont even start to compare. Think of a PV cell as a small grain of sand and one hydro complex as a huge mountain.

Take a look :

Thats a 1 528 MW dam, we have over 34 000 MW of installed power to produce electricity.  Of that number, only 600 MW is comming from coal/oil, 870 MW from gas and 675 from a CANDU nuclear reactor.  

Do you think that in our place using solar power make sense?

What we need is not raw power, we need a liquid fuel.  And the best liquid fuel for maintaining the rest of the infrastructure is biodiesel.  The most productive form of life to produce biodiesel is algae.

Most of the installation will use solar energy for power, but no PV cells at all.

Even I start to do some research on this for 2 reasons:

1st.  If the project is picking up, I will use it to talk about peak oil in Quebec and Canada, in which almost no media is talking about in anyway.

2nd. I do not think it will replace oil in all it's application.  Nothing will.  But I do think that we could run some construction equipment and maybe some buses using that liquid fuel when the diesel wont be available.

I have no intent on running the civilisation, I have maybe some idea about running our small place.  The construction equipment will be very usefull to build new living arrangement.  Altough we are a small place (30 000 people in the county) we have lots of space and maybe we could welcome more.  Building urban area that can foster people, workplace and food growing places is the ultimate goal.

The biodiesel here is only for getting that.

Also as for the energy needed, I have in tought annualized geo-solar because it need very less energy to heat in the winter and cool in the summer. I will also use bubble insulation for heating and cooling.  This will help get the sunshine trough and keep the air warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

Altough we are facing shortage risk from diesel, we have in Quebec access to very large quantities of hydro electric power.  We have only 1 or 2 coal plants I think and I dont think they run all the time.  So producing biodiesel is also a way of keeping the maintenance machinery, equipment and trucks humming for maintenance of the power grid.

Also on a purely economical basis, we are deeply impacted here because of already high oil prices.  Many sawmills are closing or on the verge of closing.  The slumping of demand for structural wood from the US (resulting from the house slump) is lowering the price of wood.

So we are impacted both in the cost structure and in the revenue structure.

I have a friend owner of a oil distributor mainly for the forestry camp.  They sell 45-50 million liter (~300 000 barrel) of diesel each year.  For the whole region it amount to 200 million liter(1.2 million barrel) each year.  

The impact on oil price if the whole region closes forestery would be not so high I think.  But the local effect will be very hard and felt trough the economy.  Because of this we will need to divert our work to producing energy (if it can be done) and building a new way of life.

I expect that it would take at least a big recession (maybe a depression) to get people on the new track.  I dont think many people will do anything if that does not happen.

Something also impacting our economy is the slump in tourism we had this summer.  Many went to the US where they offered dollar parity with the Canadian $ and the gas price refrained people in their spending.

Altough no one talks about a recession right now, I think that it will be reconized after the hunting season (hunting season is a big vacation season around here)

So I think (I'm doing more research on the subject to latter say I know) that biodiesel from algae might be part of the solution.

Well, I respond below to someone who just said "A lot of people might starve to death."

A lot of people starve to death already.  Is it really so radical to think that more might, as petroleum gets scarcer and more expensive?  And shouldn't we talk about it?

Awhile back, I was reading about a "successful" new program that was helping poor people in Africa.  The solution?  Teaching subsistance farmers to use chemical fertilizers and giving them hybrid seeds.