I predicted 100 plus dollars per barrel more than a year ago, and that after the Republican convention prices would drop, we shall see. Americans now compete with the entire world for oil and jobs following the end of the cold war. With limited global production already reached and a growing middle class in China and India where C.E.O.'s find better economic growth opportunity for their investment fuel supplies will no longer receive a preferred status in the U.S.A. I think, instead Americans will be charge the prevailing global price for fuels.

What can one say about a nation that will not realize that its own peak oil production occurred decades ago and that becoming a fuel importing nation that isn't as industrious as it once was will drive it economically downward in the long run. The remedy includes swift transition to home produced electricity for electric cars with wind, solar and fuel cell power generators. The book 'Fossil Fueled Federal Deficits' published in 2006 captured some of the elements of the several issues.

The emergent science of ecological economics recognizes the deficiencies in neo-classical economics such as discognizance of the value of public goods and the finite context of natural resource stocks. Neoclassical economists would tend to model optimal extraction and sales rates for oil and petroleum products and supply them at the highest rate customers would pay on a Pareto optimal course. Oil presently goes for 125 dollars a barrel and probably will continue up-Americans simply are used to 100 years of nearly constant gasoline prices in real dollars and haven't yet comprehended that real change is set to happen now or later with a sudden and lasting price increase.

The U.S. Congress should act-that is the Democrat Party should lead to provide a 30 year tax break for wind and solar research, sales and investments in the U.S.A. immediately. The congress never acts adequately or in a timely way to support alternate energy development leading one to wonder if all they do is get rich themselves and send pork projects to constituents.

An interesting element of all natural resource harvests such as oil or forests, fish or minerals is the implicit anti-conservation element that market economics entails such that if they can be harvested and the profits invested in something else paying a higher rate of return then it is more economically efficient to deplete the resource to extinction instead of conserving it allowing to to

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