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To support AC's point:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org...
https://www.energyandcapital.c...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

From the first one, discussing the US defense-related costs as just one aspect: "Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction. If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the âoeT,â could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick."

But there are many other external costs to fossil fuels like health care costs (the legacy of leaded gas is still taking a tremendous toll on our society, but air pollution in general is a killer). For example:
https://thinkprogress.org/here...
"The average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. right now is $2.47. If that cost took into account the environmental and human health costs of burning the gasoline, however, it would more than double, according to a new study. The study, published this week in the journal Climatic Change, created models for the âoesocial cost of atmospheric release,â a method of determining the costs of emissions beyond their market value. According to the study, accounting for the social costs of burning gasoline would add an average of $3.80 per gallon to the pump price, raising the price to $6.27. Diesel has an even higher social cost of $4.80 per gallon. The study also measured the social costs of other fossil fuels not used at the pump. Coal, for example, would jump from 10 cents per kilowatt hour to 42 cents per kilowatt hour, the study found. And natural gas, which has emerged in recent years as a cheap source of fuel, would see its price rise from 7 cents per kWh to 17 cents per kWh."

And on the legacy of leaded gas (and how it has contributed to the USA's huge prison populations): http://www.motherjones.com/env...

A related essay I wrote in 2009 on "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user":
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."

But the real answer (if maybe not politically acceptable) is not to subsidize electric cars. It is to tax *all* the externalizes of fossil fuel use at the point of purchase, bringing the cost of gas to, perhaps, US$10 a gallon or more. The tax could be redistributed as a basic income to everyone.

Perhaps the deepest irony about all this (mentioned in the above essay) is mentioned here by B

if you account for externalities like pollution, risk, defense, and so on. See Amory Lovins' research. That has been an economic tragedy from market failure of the last few decades. Markets don't work well when people don't pay the true price up front but can instead privatize benefits for themselves and socialize costs to other people. For example, some companies in the Midwest got cheaper electricity from coal, but I can't eat fish around where I live because they are contaminated with mercury from Midwestern coal pollution.

More evidence: http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
"A new report from the International Monetary Fund says global use of fossil fuels costs taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion year. Thatâ(TM)s trillion â" with a T. "
http://loe.org/shows/segments....
"The report's co-author, IMF economist David Coady tells host Steve Curwood how they calculated fossil fuels subsidies worldwide annually cost taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion."

The cost in human lives from wars in the Middle East over oil profits is another enormous part of this as is the consequences to geopolitics. How do you factor in the risk of (ironic) nuclear war over oil profits into the cost of oil? See also:
http://www.iags.org/costofoil.... (lowball)
http://www.energyandcapital.co... (highball)

This is why rates almost constantly move up.

Continual inflation, ever-rising demand (even with increasing efficiency), increasing emissions / safety regulations, etc., would account for all of that. This isn't something you need to speculate about... You can find the recorded profits of energy companies in the public record quite easily, and point out specific examples of growing and excess profits, if you can find them.

In fact, I'll give you a start...

http://www.google.com/finance?...

To (over-simplified I know) compare with inflation, click the "S&P 500" box to show the two side-by-side. Expand it out to 10+ years, and show me where this big spike in profitability (far in excess of inflation) is for the energy company... And you can check all those "related" companies linked just below, if you think some others might be more sinister...

By all means, let me know when you find something significant.

Do NG customers get NG delivered at anywhere near its real cost to deliver? No. It's horribly expensive, it's been horribly expensive, and it's going to stay horribly expensive. And all the while, energy company executives receive salaries in the eye-popping range.

Those "eye-popping" executive salaries are a problem across ALL US industries, certainly not just energy. And I don't see any evidence that natural gas companies are pulling in ridiculous profits, either:

http://www.google.com/finance?...

And more to the point, natural gas prices absolutely have been falling, with only a few brief spikes when the aging and inadequate pipelines can't handle sudden huge demand:

http://www.indmin.com/Article/...

Conspiracy theories are nice, but you need something... anything to back them up. Any little bit of solid evidence will do.

For instance, right now, the US has a huge surplus of natural gas. There's so much they just burn it right off at the oil fields

They don't burn it just for the hell of it... Whether their storage / transport / pipeline capacity is exceeded, or it's excess pressure that blows a valve, incidental seepage they can't capture, or something similar... burning (flaring) it is the proper and safe way to release/dispose of it. Technology is improving how much of it can be captured/stored, and increasing energy prices are making it more economical to go to great lengths to capture it. The use of flaring has been gradually declining over the years:

http://triblive.com/news/14420...

http://www.energyandcapital.co...

It is a wholly corrupt system.

Anybody with any background or just causal knowledge of US history can say, yes, there is plenty of corruption, but it's a tiny and continually declining fraction as much as there was in previous decades and centuries. It's believed technology has a lot to do with gradually reducing it. The level of corruption 100 years ago just would blow your mind, yet people look back with nostalgia at a sanitized version of history, without the warts you see living day-to-day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."

Reading a lot about that, it seems that renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear since the 1970s if externalities are accounted for (including pollution, disease, defense, corruption, other risk). The difference is that now, through decades of hard work by dedicated researchers, renewable are now becoming cheaper even when not accounting for externalities.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
""Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co. (GE)," Bloomberg reports."

Agreeing, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Taxes, subsidies, and regulation are all ways of dealing with externalities through government planning affecting the market.

US Republicans are the worst sort of regressive "socialists" -- they regularly privatize profits but socialize costs.

Renewables have probably been cheaper that fossil fuels and nuclear, accounting for externalities, since the 1970s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

The total is problematical, but interesting links on the true costs of oil: http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461

On the odd energetics of gasoline made using natural gas and electricity vs. plain electric cars:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

Why safer electric cars should be free:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2

See also my presentation here on five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Remember, the USA helped create bin Laden by funding and training and arming him to fight against the USSR...

Yes, I agree on the need to switch to alternative energy and energy efficiency. The total US military budget is somewhere around US$1 trillion per year (or more with interest). That's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines and home insulation. Amory Lovins (IIRC) suggested decades ago that just the operating cost for two years of the US Persian Gulf deployment force would be enough to imporve US energy efficiency to the point where we did not need the oil from the Persian Gulf. So, yet more irony. On that, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

The state of the art in Germany is now to build houses without furnaces, they are so well-built, well-insulated, and have air-to-air heat exchangers for fresh air without much energy loss.
http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/38940

Electric cars apparently use less energy per mile then it takes just to refine the oil into gasoline to go the same distance:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

Another irony is that in the 1940s and 1950s nuclear physcisits realzied the thorium-based nuclear power would be inherently safer and more abundant than uranium and plutonium based nuclear power (you can't easily make bombs from thorium and it can't melt down easily because it is used already in the molten state and can be drained easily into cooling tanks) but thorium power was discarded precisely because it was safer (you could not make bombs from it). So, instead of cheap, abundant, safe thorium power, we got lots of nuclear bombs to fight over middle east oil fields and other resource rich areas we would not need to access if we had cheap power.

I wonder that will come out of this press conference tomorrow (still not sure if it is a scam or confusion or not):
http://pesn.com/2011/06/17/9501849_Defkalion_Announces_Energy_Catalyzer_Press_Conference/
"By now, most people following exotic energy breakthroughs have read about Andrea Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) cold fusion technology. It utilizes nickel powder, hydrogen gas, an undisclosed catalyst, heat, and pressure to produce large amounts of energy. The technology is capable of producing over 4 kilowatts of thermal power from a reactor vessel only fifty cubic centimeters in volume (about he size of your fist). Cold fusion research has been ongoing for two decades, and there have been thousands of successful experiments. However, Andrea Rossi's technology is the most promising cold fusion technology yet to emerge.
Andrea Rossi's company Leonardo Corporation has licensed the technology to the Greek company Defkalion Green Technologies Inc., with sole purpose to sell, license, and manufacture industrialized commercially applicable products using the Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer with global exclusivity rights; except the Americas. Defkalion has recently sent out invitations to certain individuals to attend a press conference about the technology on June 23, 2011. The invitation is self explanatory, and is posted below. "

But in any case, we'll probably have dirt-cheap solar panels in twenty years through nanotechnology or similar improvements in materials. We'd have had cheaper solar a lot sooner if either we had more government-funded R&D on them or if US consumers had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels up front (including defense expenditures and health costs and pollution costs and war risk).
http://www.iags.org/costofoil.html
http://www.energyandcapital.com/article

Well said!

See also:

Plans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Cars:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

Agriculture:
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

But, with all that said, the same sorts of reasons solar energy is getting better (better materials, better designs, better discussions, better insights into physics) is the same reason small scale nuclear is getting better (even as I would agree solar is safer and more decentralized than conventional nuclear). And example of small nuclear:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

Related case for nuclear power:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

Let's say, in a moderate worse case in Japan that 100,000 people die from some nuclear radiation accident and the clean up cost a couple trillion dollars. Nuclear power still might have been cheaper in Japan, all things considered, than coal which causes a lot of pollution and related illness.

Would it have been cheaper in that sense than solar and wind? Probably not...

Still, given this is the worst quake to have hit Japan in a century, and the nuclear plants are not being talked about as having total meltdowns, this event itself might prove how safe they can be in some situations.

Of course, dealing with direct terrorism intended to cause them to malfunction may be a different issue, but many major industrial facilities, like at Bhopal, have that risk. And ideas like Hyperion help reduce that risk. Ultimately, if we try harder to make our global economy work for everyone, we might have less fears that people will commit terrorism because the hate us because we support their oppressors for various reasons...

On economic transformation, see:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

BTW, an example of perhaps cold fusion (still needs more confirmation):
http://pesn.com/2011/03/07/9501782_Cold_Fusion_Steams_Ahead_at_Worlds_Oldest_University/

Personally, I want to be able to print solar panels in a solar-powered 3D printer. :-)

Of course, ironically, we can just use renewable energy and not have so much controversy... But fossil fuels are heavily subsidized in terms of both government incentives and ignored externalities...
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

See also:
"Report: Famed Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers Spied for FBI"
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/14/report-famed-civil-rights-photographer-ernest-withers-spied-for-fbi/
"Ernest C. Withers had been the photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement through the 50s and 60s. His photos of the gruesome racial murder of teenager Emmitt Till still resonate to this day; he was there when nine students integrated Little Rock Central High School; and his camera shutters snapped just moments after Martin Luther King was assassinated. And all the while, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was betraying everything he knew about the civil rights movement to the FBI."

Which connects to my previous post on the open manufacturing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them :-) as well as so Smári and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-) "

And:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

By the way, someone (mrbrod) in the com

Fossil fuel costs for defense and pollution easily rack up into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. As suggested in the book Brittle Power in 1982, renewable energy has been cheaper for decades than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you include *all* the externalities.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

We just pay for fossil fuel use through our taxes and national debt for the military, and through health costs from mercury pollution and other forms of pollution that lead to health problems (even wonder why much fish is now unsafe to eat from mercury?), systemic risk like of economic disruption or global war over oil, and so on.
        http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461

By the way, it takes more electricity and natural gas to refine a gallon of gasoline from oil than an electric car would need to go the same distance, so all that oil is completely wasted -- except it is profitable for some to fleece the public treasury.
    http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

GE had a cost-competetive production ready electric vehicle built from off-the-shelf parts built in the late 1970s -- you can see it in the Schenectady, NY science museum.

That our elected officials have allowed this public fleecing using fossil fuels, including the destruction of the health of our rivers, oceans, and humanity through smog and mercury, to go on since the Reagan years is an unspeakable tragedy of widespread corruption and ignorance which wider access to pubic records might help some with.

For the cost of less than one half-year of US defense spending the USA could shift to all renewables, eliminating the need for much of the defense budget.
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
    http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
    http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html
"""
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
    All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
"""

A basic income would eliminate poverty (and was endorsed by Nobel Prize winners):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
The right amount of vitamin D would reduce sick care costs by maybe a third in industrialized countries:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A good diet, occasional fasting, and moderate exercise would reduce another third or so of sick care expenses by helping people break out of a pleasure trap from supernormal stimuli:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Single payer health care in the USA would reduce expenses (for paperwork) by a third as well (these are not all additive, of course):
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what-is-single-payer
Reinstating regulation on children's TV might help prevent damage to kids:
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
A more vegetarian diet would also free up three-quarters of agricultural lands in the USA:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear, when you factor in the externalities, like pollution, defense spending, and risk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
Switching to electric cars would probably reduce our electricity use, and eliminate the need for much oil (since it takes more electricity to refine the oil into gas than it would to run electric cars the same distance as a gallon of gas in an ICE car):
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
We can develop the technology of being able to produce almost anything from commonly found raw materials:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
We know how to make healthier communities:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Nuclear weapons and military robots are ironic because the same technology could produce abundanc

Then, if there is possible resource contention, rather than pass laws about IDs, it would seem that the most essential thing to do is to help everyone to use their imagination as "The Ultimate Resource"
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
to address any potential scarcity problems and create material abundance for all. People have already been doing that for hundreds of years, for example, Benjamin Franklin who made the pot bellied stove and bifocals and refused to patent any of that.

By the way, fossil fuels are not cheap overall, they are just profitable to a few.
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
"According to a 2000 study for the Department of Energy, there is a significant cost attached to the mere fact of our dependence. Supply disruptions, price hikes, and loss of wealth suffered through the oil market upheavals have cost the U.S. economy around $7 trillion (1998 dollars) over the 30 years from 1970 to 2000. ...
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel."

Coal has huge costs in environmental damage and health costs (from mercury pollution and other things). It actually takes more electricity to make gasoline from crude oil that in would take to make an electrical vehicle go the same distance a regular car goes on one gallon.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

It's been known since the 1980s that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you account for external costs and risks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"

Anyway, please name ten jobs you do not think could *not* be fairly easily automated over the next twenty years as robotics and AI continue to advance (at least to the point where one human can do the work of ten now)?

My take on that:
"60 jobs that will rock the future... (not)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html

So, as I see it, the urgent need is to rethink the basis of our economy before then.

There is room for quadrillions of people in the solar system if we build space habitats, so IMHO talk of birth control based on resource constraints is premature. :-)
"The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps"
http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizi

Solar panels replace hydrocarbons the same way fossil oil replaced whale oil for heating and lighting -- things change. You can produce as much electricity as you want with solar panels (or other renewable energy sources), and use some of that energy to make new panels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics#Energy_payback_time_and_energy_returned_on_energy_invested
"Thin film technologies now have energy pay-back times in the range of 1-1.5 years (S.Europe).[70] With lifetimes of such systems of at least 30 years[citation needed], the EROEI is in the range of 10 to 30. They thus generate enough energy over their lifetimes to reproduce themselves many times (6-31 reproductions, the EROEI is a bit lower) depending on what type of material, balance of system (or BOS), and the geographic location of the system.[75]"

Also, by the way, some people think "fossil" oil is self-renewing (though even then, it is too polluting to use IMHO).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
"The abiogenic hypothesis argues that petroleum was formed from deep carbon deposits, perhaps dating to the formation of the Earth. The presence of methane on Saturn's moon Titan is cited as evidence supporting the formation of hydrocarbons without biology. Supporters of the abiogenic hypothesis suggest that a great deal more petroleum exists on Earth than commonly thought, and that petroleum may originate from carbon-bearing fluids that migrate upward from the mantle."

If you plot the exponential growth rate of renewable energy for the past few decades, within two to three decades, the world will be running mostly on renewables. And there is no sign of that exponential growth rate slowing, even with the recession/depression. Peak Oil is a non-issue in that sense -- even if our society will change, and should change, in various ways, because the true cost of fossil fuels between defense and pollution and corruption is enormous.
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
It takes more electricity to make a gallon of gasoline than it would take for an electric car to go the same distance, so if we switched to electric cars, our electricity use would go down (and we would not need the oil at all).
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
Taxes would even go *down* if the US government gave luxury safe electric cars away to everyone:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. "

With energy and agriculture, you can grow feedstocks for industry on land or in the ocean to make plastics. Consider:
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/why-is-hemp-really-illegal/question-554401/
Is this true from the link? "Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fie

Except you completely ignore externalities, systemic risks, and equity, which is what got us in various messes already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Consider the "True cost" of oil from various perspectives:
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
"""
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel. That would make the "real" cost of filling up a family sedan about $220, and filling up a large SUV about $325 (when oil was $10 a barrel cheaper than it is now!).
"""

By the way, I've read it takes as much *electricity* to produce a gallon of gas as it would take an electric car to go about the same distance. So, all the external costs of gasoline are totally for nothing energywise.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"

Depending on other regions for energy creates a systemic risk. Pipelines are inherently indefensible and so require a police state to protect because one small group could do vast damage to the society by damaging just one oil pipeline. Solar panels on your roof do not require a police state to protect, just regular police; if someone vandalizes them, the entire economy does not collapse.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few who control oil companies also creates a wealth dispartity that damages democracy as well as the economy (because few can start small businesses without loans or investments from big organizations). One reason we have oil pipelines instead of solar panels everywhere is that it has been more profitable to a few people to do that, while the rest of us pay huge taxes for a military to defend those pipelines at home and abroad.

I could go on, but basically, you need to look at issues like externalities, systemic risks, and concentration of wealth to see the various ways that markets can and do fail regularly in practice unless they are taxed and regulated. Taxes and regulation have their problems too, of course:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Ideally, we need to move beyond markets and rationing for most things. So, your enthusiasm is great. You're right that cheap energy would help with a lot of things (as long as it was also relatively clean, inherently safe, and long lasting -- like wind and solar and many other renewables). Ideally, we want an energy infrastructure that is inherently secure, not brittle and requiring now about a trillion dollars a year to secure extrinsically with soldiers and bombs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Still, if all the benefits of cheap energy or any other major innovation go to a few people, then we just have another problem. See Marshall Brain's short story on this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

You're right that a left that focuses on rationing and scarcity is dysfunctional; that has historically b

Oh, those poor poor oil companies. They have so much trouble making money: this is from the Wall St. Journal, that known left wing rag http://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/oil-tax-break.asp

We all know that Big Oil has been making record profits, so I wonder what they've been doing with all that money? How about buying back their own stock? http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/big-oil-profits/609

"The handwriting is on the wall. The oil majors used 56% of their cash flow on share repurchase ... they are not replacing reserves."

So, despite the commercials on TV, they're not spending money on finding new oil and they're not spending it on other energy sources, they're driving the price up on the outstanding shares with stock buy-backs.

You claim that they are serving the common good, and that investments in renewable energy are bad for everyone. So how does that fit in with extraordinary tax breaks and stock repurchases? These facts support an alternate view: these greedy capitalists are only interested in stealing as much money as they can lay there hands on, and if the side effects are food riots in the 3rd world, the destruction of the US economy, and global warming, it's OK with them. They'll get so rich that they and their heirs will never have to worry while the rest of us rot.