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Energy Will Lead the Next Commodity Shortage

This author's general thesis of upcoming shortages in fossil fuels is quite plausible. Too bad he let's his reactionary political ideology get in the way of a dispassionate evaluation of our predicament. To rail ad nauseum against the environmental extremists is to completely miss the point of why we're in our present day fix. We could only wish that greenies had anything like that much power in our large-corporation dominated political system (almost as true with the Democrats as with the Republicans). If we'd only taken Jimmy Carter's environmental foresight seriously instead of tossing him out of office in favor of Reagan's deregulation of big business and decoupling of federal spending from any semblance of control, we'd be most of the way off foreign oil dependence and onto a variety of renewable energy sources at this juncture -- and probably without the Iraq & Afganistan foreign entanglements as well as the wrenching collapse of the house-of-cards American banking system selling ponzi scheme worthless paper to the rest of the world.

Anyway, all political biases aside, the US might as well bite the bullet now in our time of distress and upheaval and get onto a sustainable energy track. Anything less is just delaying the inevitable day of paying the piper. There's nothing radical about investing in an infrastructure based on technologies and systems that are sustainable, local and independent for the foreseeable future. Natural gas certainly fills some of the bill, but we're likely to discover very shortly that global climate change is not a shrill alarmist cry but an enormous issue that will dominate our struggle to survive as a species. Virtually every scientist in the world who isn't beholden to corporate entrenched interests via having their research funded by an energy company has come to that hair-raising conclusion. I'm always bemused that so many Americans are repeatedly brainwashed so easily by corporate special interest marketing. You'd think that in light of the widespread anger these days toward the big banks and the Fed in collusion with the politicians for ripping the rest of us off to line their own wallets, most Americans would be suspicious of other similarly powerful big industry groups. But no, we continue to buy into their self-serving disseminations as they paint their enemies (ie those who want to free the people from their choke holds) as extremists or worse. Wake up and start to think for yourselves, people!

Various sources of renewable energy are currently extremely cost competitive with new developments of non-renewables, whether we're talking oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear. And that's without even considering the enormous subsidies these entrenched industries are enjoying, from infrastructure buildouts to taxation policies, and from taxpayer funded liability insurance to our fighting foreign wars. The challenge with renewables is they require a mental shift: they have to be site specific -- what works in the Southwest sunbelt is different than what works on the windy great plains or the geothermally active mountains of Alaska. Once the initial capital outlay is made (and for example, wind energy is cheaper than even coal in this regard), the fuel is free and it's difficult for the existing big energy companies to rake in the same profits. So of course they're doing their level best to discredit this whole trend with massive disinformation. Remind anyone of the tobacco companies?

Stuck Between Gold's Rise and Market's Decline

Good point on the evils of rewarding those who have failed. But why such an outcry regarding families victimized by the excesses of the banking system and the failures of the government? Where is the outrage about the people in charge who should have seen this coming but were blinded by their greed for profits and their self-serving deregulation ideology? Most of these families who are now in trouble were led like sheep to the slaughter.

Wuxi Pharma: Too Much of a Good Thing

The more relevant question at this point is, what is likely to happen to the stock price when the current bout of insider trading has run its course and we have come out the other side of the perfect storm, humbled but still kicking? With a growing business and very low stock valuation, are we looking a perfect conditions for a dramatic rebound? Or do you see continued pressures keeping the stock price depressed for the foreseeable future?

Drilling in ANWR: What's Not to Like?

What's not to like is:

a) The enormous expense and energy of developing ANWR is diverting us from the vital task of getting off our oil addiction and developing our renewable energy resources. Until we move in this direction, we will continue to be at the mercy of middle eastern oil producers and get sucked into more bankrupting overseas military fiascos.

b) Even in the best-case scenario, ANWR oil won't get to the consumer for more than a decade from now; other energy sources can be tapped much more quickly.

c) While it is not yet perfectly clear what the effect on our global climate and local weather patterns will be, and while there are of course natural cycles of climate change, it makes no sense to imagine that humans injecting massive greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning oil and coal aren't having a significant impact on the global atmospheric and ecological systems. In fact, if natural cycles are warming the earth now anyway, it is even MORE urgent for us not to exacerbate the problem by burning more oil.

d) Quite possibly even more alarming than climate change is the acidification of the world's oceans, as a direct result of the rapid rise in CO2 in the atmosphere. The impact on the oceans' primary productivity is drastic and may result in a collapse of that vital food resource around the world.

e) it is insane to be using up our precious remaining oil reserves (that are relatively easy to get at and affordable to extract) by burning them, both in the internal combustion engine and for heating. Other sources of energy -- generated from renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave -- can serve those purposes admirably. We should be saving our oil for uses for which there aren't easy substitutes, such as petrochemicals, plastics, and the myriad other products that have become essential in our modern technological economy.

f) A national crash program to develop our vast domestic renewable energy resources would be a terrific stimulus to the US economy. We could put to beneficial use America's legendary abilities to innovate and adapt to change, become a world leader in an industry with huge export potential, win back much of the admiration of the rest of the world that we have squandered under the current administration, and more or less save the world to boot. Only our flat-earth mindset is standing in the way.

Is Oil a Bubble? Part 3

The author writes "I am not one to completely ignore the environment either. However, I have read that Louisiana, where many of our drilling and refineries are located, is one of the top areas for fisheries, and that the fish have thrived amid the drilling infrastructure."

Jordan: Good article, but you're radically off base here. Fish in the Gulf may be thriving, but any human concerned about health shouldn't be eating them. Gulf fish and seafood are loaded with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, thanks largely to the oil development in the area.

In contrast, the waters of Alaska are still pristine (save where residual oil sludge from the Exxon Valdez still permeates the beaches of Prince William Sound), and the salmon produced here are some of the healthiest food produced on this planet. Out salmon runs are thriving, too -- unlike the salmon of the West Coast and most of the rest of the world, which have been annihilated by industrial development. Drilling for oil in ANWR or Bristol Bay would most certainly be the first phase of the destruction of Alaska's healthy wild ecosystems.

I want to profit from my energy stocks as much as anyone, and besides I benefit from Alaska's annual oil permanent fund dividend -- to say nothing of the absence of a state income or sales tax -- but I live here because the air is clean, the wild food is pure, the wilderness is close at hand and the quality of life is so high most of the rest of the world can't even conceive of it. I don't want our addiction to an obsolete, environmentally destructive and politically suicidal oil industry to continue devastating my home or the rest of the planet. It's time to start thinking outside the box and develop our vast renewable energy resources. They can be the foundation of an economy much stronger and more stable than our current oil-dependent house of cards.

Apple's iChat and China: The Perfect Marriage

<if you are obsessed with grammer over content, don't read blogs. Go read some journals by Harvard professors.>

Hey, User 163362 -- grammar (and spelling for that matter, where you obviously face some challenges of your own!) really have only one purpose: to facilitate communication. Incorrect grammar and spelling make it tough to read and comprehend any sort of writing. It makes no difference whether the text is published in a scholarly journal or posted on a blog.

In both cases cited here -- the incorrect use of apostrophes for plurals and your misspelling -- it's pretty simple to figure out what the authors intended. But even these mistakes do distract from the content, diverting the reader's attention when noticing the gap in the grammatical logic of the passage, often causing him to go back to re-read the passage and double-check whether some aspect of the message was missed in the first reading, and generally interrupting the flow of thought that the author was trying to convey. Good writing paints a vivid mental picture; lousy writing interferes with that flow.

While these are hardly the most egregious examples of spelling and grammar errors, I support Grammar Nazi in trying to elevate the level of writing (and thereby communication) here and everywhere else words are put to virtual paper. Too many people in our blogging/text-messagin... society don't have a clue how to get their ideas across effectively.