[Agamemnon]

If Chomsky hated hypocrisy, he wouldn't have wasted years denying the holocaust crimes of his friend Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Well, I suppose if he hasn't reneged on that support, then he wasn't a hypocrite in that case, just wrong, no? I'm not sure if he's apologized or renounced any of his work, but I haven't heard of it.

I don't think its capitalism that gets Chomsky's goat, its the corrupt corporate-friendly regulation. He hates hypocricy, not the marketplace. It just so happens that the largest and most obvious forms of hypocricy take place in the (heavily regulated) markets.

I have no idea what you meant by that. It reads like a political statement versus fact.

I'd call it a belief, but if you think belief = political bias, thats fine with me.

You seem to be implicitly tying low energy prices to technological/efficiency development. I'd wager that regardless of the oil prices, _oil-extraction_ technology will continue to develop and improve.

I demonstrated without ambiguity that energy efficiencies resulted in a declining oil price environment. Chomsky appears to say its only possible in a rising oil price environment. I said both could be the case, as you did. We both disagree with Chomsky.

Chomsky believs that if oil is low, money spent on alternative energies will be low. If oil prices are high, money spent on alternative energies will be high. Same page? (remember, the word 'alternative' comes up a lot, not to be confused with 'oil' or 'petroleum'. He's talking about energy efficiency, not oil efficiency.)

The fact that the petroleum industry has increased its effectiveness at pulling oil out of the ground, or refining it, does not reflect an increasing 'effciency' in energy.. just in the extraction, distribution, and pollution of oil/gas. You seem to be taking the whole alternative energy portion of this issue right out of the equation.

High oil prices will drive alternative energy reserach (and increased oil efficiency, yes), and low prices will remove the impetus for improving efficiency in energy sectors.

Yes to the former, no to the latter. We have clear evidence of efficiencies developing in a falling cost environment.

I think if oil was totally cheap, a company would definitely spend less on improving efficiency than if oil was very expensive. Am I wrong? Sure, the oil industry has improved efficiency... but so has every single heavy industry existing. Chomsky is arguing that lower oil prices will reduce the need (and reality) of improving effciency. Just because _some_ efficiency occurred (strictly within petroleum energy, not much in alternative) doesn't mean "our energy needs are more efficient", it means, "we've made extracting and burning oil more efficient". Its still an inherently innefficient process, no matter how you dress it up.

I have nothing against Nader. He did some great work that's benefited us all. I merely remarked on his impact in driving for increasing environmental regulations that may have forced greater energy efficiencies on industry looking to reduce costs.

I guess Nader's agenda (and one's attitude towards it) depends on your perspective. I believe that the economy is a subsystem of the environment. You can have an environment w/out an economy, but you can't have an economy w/out an environment. I see Nader as a guy who's thinking long-term, past the next election, past the next quarter. I think that short-term thinking has absolutely dominated environmental and economic policy, and is really short-sighted when it comes to the future. The biggest chip the anti-Nader crowd can throw out is "its bad for the economy". The biggest chip Nader's got is "its bad for the environment". Take your pick I guess.

France and Germany are going slowly broke and being forced to pare back their social structure to conform more closely with British and American standards. Norway would be no different. You can decide if that's an "impact" event or not. It certainly would look like a big deal to me.

I've already said that it would affect Russia and Norway... just nowhere near as badly as it would effect the regimes of the Middle East. Those regimes are 100% supported by these revenues, Norway and Russia are totally diversified in comparison.

Let me put it this way. An Arab regime (like Saudi), deprived of its oil, would be shattered. It would have virtually no economy. Norway/Russia, while they might have to pull back on their social programmes, would be doing much better comparatively. That's why I compared them when I first made that statement.

Well, I must have missed something because anyone saying Muslim states have some other commodity or product to sell besides oil isn't living in the real world. You can't remove hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues from a country with limited industrial capacity and a basic economy and say it won't impact something. That's plainly obvious.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that "Muslim states" and their governments and people are somehow a single entity. I'm not sure if you mean to miss what I'm saying or don't, but you seem to be ignoring it.

Arab regimes are the primary beneficiaries of oil revenues. Some of that money goes into that state's infrastructure, but not much (as we can see by the crappy standard of life most of them live in). Here's the tricky part. This regime is separate from the 'people' of that country. If joe Arab state gets 10 billion in oil revenues, puts 2 billion into the state, and pockets 8 billion, then I would contend that the entities dependent on the oil revenues are the ones receiving the bulk of the cash; the regimes. The 'state', which is the people, often gets screwed at the expense of the regime.

Thus, many Arab-states are not 'dependent' on oil because the 'state' doesn't see most of that money anyway. How can you 'depend' on something that you're not getting the benefits of? Surely some oil money makes it to the people, but the trickle looks pretty thin if you see the images of how these people often live on the government news stations.

IF these states were to gain full control over oil revenues, and eliminate corruption, then the Middle East would be able to fully exploit their resources and upgrade their societies. At THAT point, would those states then become 'dependent' on oil revenue.

I stand by my contention that many of them do not currently depend on oil revenues, their regimes do.

As I said earlier, if you can't separate a regime from a state, that's your hang-up, not mine.

Since oil is probably about $20 higher than it should be right now, I guess that IS my opinion. And also the opinion of the Chairman of Imperial Oil judging by his comments in the paper yesterday.

Well, I guess this is where we part company. I'm not a huge fan of listening to what the Chairman of Imperial Oil believes should be the proper market price. MY opinion is that oil companies and their relatives do whatever they can to artificially keep extraction costs low, and retail costs high. What reason would they have, at all, to tell us the truth about anything? Their priority isn't to publish the truth for you to read in the paper, its to make money.

As I stated before, there are a variety of major influences on the price of oil, only one of which is supply and demand, as I've already conceded. If you believe those are the only factors, have a good one.