>>We should have tacked on 50 cents to a dollar a gallon years ago to help wean people off of gasoline.
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>>Completely unacceptable
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>So do you think the free market is the best way to deal with declining natural resources.
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>I think the free market can't have a long enough view to turn the corner on this and we could be in danger of running out of energy capacity.

While I agree the market has proven to be a very imperfect way of dealing with energy issues, there are geopolitical factors that have certainly kept the market from functioning in a rational way. And I share your suspicion of the contention the market will magically protect us from energy disaster.

The problem with alternatives is the lack of insight on the social engineering side.

A lot of tinkering - especially at the tax level - invokes the law of unintended consequences ( as we so dramatically proved in both the US and UK with the Great Society and Big Labor ) However well intentioned the intervention - and even logical at a theoretical level - sometimes more harm results than good.

If in fact we could reduce oil consumption in any way, I'd be all for it for geopolitical reasons. But if the result of Obama's wished for $10 a gallon gasoline was to throw the economy in the tank and bankrupt the very poorest while the richest could still afford to use all the gas they wanted, or if industry shutdown because transportation was no longer economically viable I'm not sure we'd have the intended result.

I am suspicious of millennial solutions social engineered by experts. There are not too many examples of their success. At least a free market has more predictable cause-effect tracking.

The problem with social engineering is it is seldom results-tested. Theory - even dogma - tends to trump result. Once you've made a Great Leap Forward, it isn't popular to recalibrate and take a few steps back.

It seems to me that only a technological breakthrough will solve the problem long term and there should be a great deal of cooperation among net energy consuming nations to consider it a matter of national security to change the balance against net energy exporting nations.