I agree that the guys who were in the know and calling the shots should have to lose everything before tax payers get "asked" to foot the bill, but of course there is no mechanism to do that.

Has anybody ever heard of any serious movement among big investors to propose a standard of corporate governance/operation that IS better? I seem to recall hearing how the California public employees pension fund has clout because of their size. So why don't they exercise it by pushing for companies to adhere to governance that is more transparent and accountable? If there was a new standard that people had higher confidence in, wouldn't that give those companies and advantage in raising capital that they might be able to leverage in a favorable way. (Obviously I am not a "sophisticated" investor, just your basic index fund in my 401k.)

And this is why:

"Human Nature will shoot any -ism you've got straight to hell."

If you and I set up a beautiful free market with me selling you my fresh baked bread, it all goes to crap on day 2 when I start selling you yesterday's bread and telling you it was fresh-baked this morning.*

We will always need regulation of the marketplace to protect us from each other.

*I am not actually a baker so don't worry, this example is just for the purposes of illustration.

EMStoveken is the source of the quote:

"Human Nature will shoot any -ism you've got straight to hell."

Sorry.

Cary this letter has got to be a fraud!

Are you really suggesting that all of the systems on your car are equivalent to the systems on my car? BTW I average 34 MPG in mixed driving (~50/50 highway/lighted traffic signals).

I was in such hurry to look smart busting this phony letter writer, but then reread Cary's response as suggested by jjm152

"...It's more fun than playing the gullible columnist..."

Forgive me, I just recently joined Salon and am enjoying having a forum to discuss things of interest...

That link you posted describes some incredibly scary sh!t. This is a theme that I found myself drawn to, again and again. It seems like greed has grown to the point where it actually threatens the very system that feeds it. Complex "investments" like this sound like a f***ing crime to me. They allow very clever people to construct obscure financial instruments that no one understands (and are probably extremely poorly regulated), that simply extract wealth from the world economy like a parasitic tapeworm. It makes a guy like me with my pittance invested in an index fund in a 401k look like a ridiculous chump.

So is the reason that the Ponzi scheme that is our world economy has begun to implode the fact that the intrinsic value that was continually injected (at the deepest levels by cheap oil) is no longer available to sustain the payoffs to the recent investors in the pyramid scheme?

Has anybody seen any discussion of this idea? (That is the idea that the era of cheap energy supported a house of cards world economy with absurd fundamentals.)

I am thinking that it is because to be able to recoup the costs of research and development, they would need to be able to sell the electric cars in a bigger marker like the US. But the US always (until recently) had gas so cheap that nobody would pay any premium price for a car that wasn't a high performance car. The economics just a few years ago weren't good enough to get GM to release their electric car.

Maybe this time it happens, unless someone who doesn't want it too can keep the price of oil just low enough...

We would have all of the same problems with jojoba beans as we do with corn:

• Who is going to grow it? Farmers.

• Where are they going to grow it? On their farms.

• What happens to the food crops that they were growing on their farms? They go away.

• What happens to global food prices? They go up.

"jojoba is MUCH BETTER than ethanol"

But is so much better than corn that it will allow us to generate enough fuel without swapping too many acres of existing crops and/or adding too many new acres of land to cultivate it?

If you know of any sources that give some numbers, I actually would kind of like to try doing a rough calculation. I have been wondering how many acres of land would be needed if some sort of crop (corn, switch grass, jojoba beans, ...) were used to grow all of our fuel. I bet it would have to be something like 10x more productive than corn to ethanol to have any shot.

Even then, it seems unlikely to be the solution. Even if marginal lands could be used, most of our farmers are kind of busy growing whatever they grow now (which is not jojoba beans). So who is going to grow them? And where are they going to grow them? It would require setting up entire new farming operations in places where they probably is nothing now.

Sounds like a lot of us have been eagerly reading those tantalizing reports about investment and research into alternative fuels and power sources that keep coming along. Maybe we can keep making progress even with opposing forces trying to keep the status quo.

I wonder if the companies/nations/people who are trying to keep milking the cash cows they have now, have some plans (insert conspiracy theory here) for how to make the transition when we really need to...

Or are they just so blinded by the mountains of money they are making right now that they can't see beyond the next profit report. If the world waits too long and everything falls apart, those mountains of cash aren't gonna save them, but maybe they can eat cash sandwiches.