Peak Oil in Money and Markets

My latest Money and Markets ... on Peak Oil ... is up today at
http://moneyandmarkets.com/press.asp?rls_id=271&cat_id=6&

This one was really cut a lot in the editing process. Now, if anybody needs an editor, it's me. I'm loquacious to a fault. But I'd like to include one of the passages that was cut right here...

Wind … nuclear … hydro … I believe all these alternatives should be explored, and as rapidly as possible. Rather than spend $85 billion a year in Iraq to … well, I don’t know why the hell we’re in Iraq … why don’t we spend $85 billion here in the U.S. developing viable alternative energy and public transportation systems? Russia, for example, has electrified a railway spanning from one end of the country to the other. China is building electrified railways, too. The energy savings are HUGE. Why can’t we invest in electrified rail? Or any of the other half-dozen solutions we could bring online in the next five years?

The problem is a lack of vision and willpower on the national level. I hope it changes soon.

William Howard Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency,” recently compared the reaction of Americans to rising oil prices to the classic “five stages of grief”:

1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance

What are they grieving for? For what Vice President Dick Cheney once called “the American way of life that is non-negotiable" – cheap gas so we can drive around in big cars.

Many Americans are still in stage 1. Working Americans who are getting squeezed mercilessly at the pumps are angry; they’re at stage 2. I hope our national consciousness moves quickly to stage 5 – acceptance. That’s when we get on doing what we need to do – what we should have done after the FIRST oil crisis in the 1970s.

Here’s an interesting fact: Brazil took the first oil shock as a challenge. At the time, it imported a lot of oil. Now, three decades later, it is about to become self-sufficient in energy thanks to conservation, innovation, offshore drilling and ethanol made from sugar cane.

I think we can do it FASTER than Brazil. We put a man on the moon, for Pete’s sake. Don’t tell me that Americans can’t rise to this challenge.

We just need to do it before oil hits $100 a barrel.

There, I feel better. If you don't know what Peak Oil is, click through to the article. Some of my explanation was changed -- I'm sure there were GOOD reasons for doing that, Mister Editor, he said through a clenched smile -- but it explains the basics pretty well.

Check out my new gold and energy blog at MoneyAndMarkets.com