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Note to Il Mostro. These crazy types are not as fringe as you claim
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anyone who doesn't agree with you is "crazy", be they Nobel Price winners or heads of MIT. No matter how much thought they have put into the matter.
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Surely you are not saying that a top-down command and control approach is reasonable? I thought you had already repudiated such an obviously bad idea. In fact you lambasted me for lumping you in with these nutcases, for which I apologize.
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a sharp drop in oil demand in China
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Have any references for that? I have not been following China very closely lately, but all I've seen is that their demand is only up about 5% this year, compared to 15% last year.
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My typo. I meant drop in demand
growth, which is still significant. I learned about the drop from econbrowser here:
linky
where he reported that China demand growth had dropped from 35% in 2004 to 1.4%
I'll look around for where I found the stats on increased drilling. ...
But the point is that $60/barrel is causing *exactly* the changes Heywood wants to achive via top-down controls. The point is that there's no way a small group of people, no matter how informed and intelligent and well-meaning they might be, could ever begin to hope to account for all factors. Meanwhile the market itself does a marvelous job of it.
Those who are not as ardenltly pro-market as I am may indeed be correct that we need things like the SEC and the FDA to protect us. There's certainly room for debate there.
But peak oil is *exactly* the kind of problem the market solves best and govt bureaucracy screws up worst. It's a purely market problem. Oil a real world commodity, with cycles of supply/demand, with competition in the form of alternatives, and with a lot of money at stake for the market winners.
All the changes that the top-down advocates want to achieve are already occuring naturally in the market, and will only continue as the price of oil remains high.
natedogg