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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (93192)	4/13/2003 3:36:13 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

re: energy independance: The problem here, is that the oil companies have managed to "externalize" much of their costs, and thereby create a flawed uneconomic system. The 100B+ we are spending on Iraq (and that's just this year), should really be considered part of the cost of a fillup for our SUVs. If we didn't need to import oil, the whole sequence of events that led to our occupation of Iraq, would have been avoided. The article I posted, said that by one calculation, those "externalized" costs add $13/B to the true cost of oil. Add that to the average cost of a barrel of oil, and it totally changes where investment, R&D, etc., should be done, in developing energy sources. You are right, that there is no shortage of oil, now or in the future. Or, to be more accurate, there is no shortage of energy. The threatened energy shortage, is as illusory as the cropland shortage, the water shortage, and so on. All these "shortages" are really a shortage of human ingenuity and organizational ability. Which, unfortunately, are in very short supply in many places. For instance, there has been much talk about looming "water wars." But the planet is mostly covered, to a great depth, in water. In reality, there is only a shortage of clean water where it's needed. Which can be solved with available proven technology (desalination, re-use, pipelines, etc). Which can be available everywhere, if energy was cheap.