unless you needed to get demolition done in a hurry.

Drat! Now you have to rebuild what you just blew up.

If only knowledgeable speculators were losing their shirts with AND my home value weren't negatively effected, I agree that no protection is warranted - let people take their chances. But the world has no shortage of suckers, and just because people can be taken advantage of does not make deceiving them any less of a crime, just easy pickens for greedy people with low morals. I want to see those people punished.

As for the big fish that believed the bond ratings on the bags full of turd loans that they bought, thinking they were bags of roses...why don't you sue the bond rating guys if no criminal charges come up? Either they they are criminals or their models are sh!t and they are totally incompetent. I don't understand why those guys are not getting hammered, the losses are huge and they played a central role in the whole fiasco.

I'm not claiming to be knowledgeable about the history of these commodities trading tools, but if this statement is correct:

The first major change to this regulatory framework occurred in 1991...

Then how is this statement (coming from a guy who made his money in the field we might note) possibly true?

Anyone who thinks the oil market would work just fine with only producers, refiners and end-users has never spent a day trading, or seen liquidity vanish just when a specific transaction was most desirable or necessary, because there was no middleman willing to take it on as a bet.

If I recall correctly, prior to 1991 petroleum/gasoline were readily available because you could make money selling them, since, well you know, they are actually useful products.

ps-I like how he calls the transaction a bet, which to me implies everyone who is not offsetting actual risk from doing business (like a producer, refiner, or distributor ) should be doing their "transactions" in a separate marketplace. I think they call them casinos, which is where you usually try to make money when you don't actually do anything useful.

Hopefully their experience with churning out massive quantities of semiconductor devices cheaply is the final push needed to make solar energy start showing up on the pie charts that show the sources for generated power. From then on it should continue to grow and grow and grow...

Even if the nations with factions dedicated to maintaining the status quo try, the prize is too great to suppress innovation forever. Somebody with nothing to lose (and everything to gain) will keep pushing. Germany maybe? Japan? China? They have little or no oil so nothing to lose there. But they do have strong economies, technological know-how, and just maybe the ambition to be the provider of the next wave of energy production.

If the US and others don't want to do it, somebody will. Might even be the Saudis, since they can afford anything their hearts desire.

I don't think that part is a given. We WILL make the transition, no doubt about that since the economics will force it. But if we let idiots push policies that pretend that we can continue to use petroleum derived from ever more expensive sources of production, and then wait until the last minute to make the switch, we will feel some pain. Some of the more progressive countries are definitely going to be ahead of us on the changeover, and I think that gives them a real competitive advantage. But if China beats us on that, game over. We will never overtake them in anything again after that.

Maybe some of the farmers should just forget the cotton and go with the amaranth. From wikipedia (linked to from my signature if you want to read more), the nutritional value of the grain is quite good...

Amaranth seeds, like buckwheat and quinoa, contain protein that is unusually complete for plant sources.

I personally have cooked up amaranth many times, it is too small to make a meal by itself (at least the variety I get), but if you like healthy veggie & grain salads, it is a great addition.

Oh, and perhaps more importantly to the farmers, people like me pay good money for amaranth at Whole Foods and such places.

That's got to be the ultimate in de-centralized power generation. Plus the places with the most sunshine need the most cooling, so go ahead and blast your AC, just put some solar panels on the roof. There is even some overlap between peak demand overall and peak generation from the sun in case you are just feeding into the grid.

Pickens' idea sounds like a scam of epic proportions to me. Wouldn't the losses from transmitting power from the midwest to anywhere far away (especially the coasts) pretty much eat up all of the power?

I do like the sound of agore's idea of power storage by using wind to refill reservoirs by pumping water, but I'm guessing that a lot of energy gets lost to friction in the pumps and pipes in the process. There was some story a while back about an MIT professor who developed a cheap catalyst material that would be used as the electrode to split water to provide hydrogen. Probably a long way off from commercial use, but that sounds promising for energy storage to me.