Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

He also has acquired taxpayer-guaranteed municipal bonds to the tune of $2.2 billion to finance the cost of a water pipeline. The water pipeline is just a ruse to piggyback power lines for the wind farm.

I posted about it here.

Alternatives to oil have been with us all along; oil keeps winning only because it’s cheaper than all the rest. When that is no longer the case, the alternatives will be used. Thus I would agree with Cosmic’s statement that we will never "run out" of oil. If natural reserves run low, then we will stop using them as they become more and more expensive and alternatives become more competitive.

T. Boone Pickens is an interesting fellow, and obviously not dumb, but he’s not the only smart observer in the market, and it seems to me like this version of the Malthusian Fallacy is just like all the others: it fools smart people all the time.

The market is a suprisingly effective means of predicting the future. The market is not panicking because those who look at such things as a source of income and power look at oil tar, oil sands, oil shale and potential synthetic oil sources and have concluded that we are not in danger of running out of oil anytime soon.

Just the oil in Colorado’s oil shale alone would provide all the world’s oil needs at today’s level of use for several generations. And the technology to extract oil from oil shale has steadily improved to the point that there are now efforts to make it commercially successful.

"Peak Oil" is very comparable to "Global Warming" in its hype, its follower’s zeal and its complete lack of grounding in actual facts.

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The DOWNside of Palin’s speech

The fact is that if we do actually run out of oil, it will be the first ever natural resource that we have exhausted.  And if we are running out, the markets seem to not be aware of it (or supply and demand laws have been reversed) given the 23% drop in oil prices over the past month or two.

Agreed. I’m not the typical voter/viewer. I know that in politics, delivery is hugely important, and Governor Palin delivered. My grading was on my own personal scale, where content is king.

In today’s political arena, a "B+ content" speech delivered with "A+ style and wit" will beat the heck out of an "A+ content" speech delivered with "B+ style and wit" every single time. In fact I would say that virtually every speech Obama has given has been C level or below on content, unless you count meaningless platitudes as content.

I’ve been reading the Lefy blogs to see how well Palin did. Based on the vitriol and disgusting comments I am finding there, she did very well indeed. I like this woman more and more every day. There may yet be something that I discover in the future to change my mind, but right now my personal opinion is that of the four people on the two tickets, I’d take her in a heartbeat over any of the other three.

Arnold:

You go on a doomsday prophet spree and then have the gall to tell the rest of us that WE are the ones who are acting like idiots. If anyone is displaying behavior that has gone off the narrow path of rationality here, it ain’t me buddy.

Oil is a finite resource for sure. At least now it is. But in the future it may not be finite at all. There are both biological and chemical means to create oil, or products so much like oil that they are effectively oil. They are not economically feasible today because of the amount of energy they require. But if there is some cheap and freely available source of energy, then making oil suddenly becomes completely reasonable.

And what would do that? Well, nuclear energy comes to mind. Particularly nuclear fusion.

Arnold you remind me of the alarmists a century ago who warned the world that the horse and buggy was going to doom civilization to a future of mile-high horse manure piles in every city.  They were serious too. And they too predicted the doom of modern civilization. And they were just as right as you are.

Because, Arnold, you are predicting the future based on the technology and the policy decisions of the past. But the thing about the future is that THINGS CHANGE Arnold. And usually those things are not the things that people like you predict. Far from it. The entire history of mankind so far has been one steady improvement of technology, moving from one energy source to another as we grow and learn.

I don’t think we’ve reached the end of that trend Arnold. I think we are still in the early stages of it in fact.

Long before we run out of oil, we’ll run out of a need for oil.

That’s my prediction. We’ll check back on this in fifty years, OK?

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..This will backfire?

What? They weren’t joking? They were serious? Now that’s funny!

As for Governor Palin’s speech: sorry, Arnold, I’m gonna have to disagree. Oh, not about your prognostications (we’ll have to wait and see on those), but on the quality of the speech itself. I’ll grant that it was well-delivered; but as an old-time debater, I try hard to see past delivery and get to content.

And on the level of content, I’ll give the speech a B, maybe a B+. It was solid, but not spectacular. Not that there was anything wrong with it. I agreed with much of what Governor Palin had to say. But I was looking for something new, and there just really wasn’t much new here. All of her major points have already appeared on blogs and news sites, many long before her nomination. As far as content is concerned, I could’ve written the same speech myself, simply by compiling the best points from conservative sites for the past week.

And to be fair, that was my reaction to Senator Obama’s speech last week as well. No new content there (save for his almost embarrassed mention of nuclear power). It was all retread material. Again, I could’ve written it myself. Another B/B+. (Senator Biden’s speech was even less original. C/C-. Snooze…)

I’m coming to the conclusion that blogs and news sites are generally ahead of the campaign cycle: sometimes wrongly (as in the reprehensible Palin pregnancy rumors or the odious Obama Muslim smears), but often correctly. Neither party gets that yet. They still play by old media rules, even when they think they’re not. Some of Governor Palin’s best lines were on the Internet hours before she delivered them. Why? Because in the old days, campaigns delivered speech drafts early, to ensure the speeches would make it into the late/early editions of the papers. Today, they still follow this outmoded practice; and the result is that the speeches are undercut, at least for the subset of the populace that’s following online. As that subset grows, the campaigns really need to learn new approaches.