Can electricity replace oil? If it has to it will. I drive I-90 a lot between Butte MT and Coeur d'Alene ID. There are funny little brick buildings along the RR track with lots of insulators on top. In the early 1900's the Milwaukee Road began to use electicity to power locomotives over the Bitterroots. They replaced electricty with diesel and went bankrupt in the '70's. Our entire rail system could be electrically driven, if necessary. Does anyone remember the Messerschmitts and Isettas of the '50's? Two-passenger cars that weighed less than 1000 lbs. With a few hundred lbs of lead acid batteries (ancient technology) such a vehicle could carry commuters to work 100 miles RT per day. They would be less safe than the behemoths we now drive, but the end of oil means some change in the way we do things. Besides the technology for using car-to-car computer communication, radar, etc would reduce collisions by an order of magnitude, or more. That is existing technology that is already being implemented.

As for 6000 nuclear plants in the world being required to replace oil, that is certainly not undoable, and in fact desirable.

I left my 2005 Odyssey at the dealer the other day for some service and decided to walk over to the outboard motor store to look at a new 2 HP motor for my sailboat. The salesman who sold me the car last summer saw me walking by and offered to lend me a car to drive the 1.5 miles each way. I declined and said I enjoyed walking, which astonished him. Americans need and will get and attitude adjustment on this type of thinking.

Resource shortages can bring out incredible ingenuity. Right now our country is run by people who are very good at bullshit, as are most Salon readers. Most technologists have a trace of autism in them, and are not good at rising in bureaucracies. As I pointed out in another post the one million Romans of the 6th century did not have a single person who could rebuild the aquaducts when the Barbarians knocked them down. Or the ones who could were stopped by bureaucrats and bullshitters who were concerned about the environmental and social problems that might result. Salon seems to have more than its share of those with verbal ability, but no technological competence or even insight.

Bush has accomplished most of what he set out to do. He, following the lead of every American president since WW2, is trying to make sure the Middle East remains stable for supplying oil, through American and Saudi oil companies. The bases will be there with or without a civil war, and we will make deals with whoever controls the oil fields. Of course, geopolitics has changed in the last 60 years. Sooner or later the Chinese and Russians will force us out of Central Asia and the Middle East. Bush's deal with the Indians is an attmept to get an ally in the region. If Bush had admitted his real motives, the American people would have had a debate and a real cost-benefit analysis. It would have been obvious that the costs in blood and treasure would have been borne by ordinary Americans, and the benefits would have flowed to Texas Oil Oligarchs and Saudi Princes. Since most Democratic politicians are also on the take from the Oligarchs and Princes, they won't say much. But the war between the Kurds, Sunnis, and the Shiites might just upset Bush's little applecart.

All the men I know that are "snappy" dressers are either gays or gigolos. My wife wishes I dressed better, but I'm your typical slob engineer. I had a girlfriend once who worked at an art gallery. That was a truly gay world, and I had to get used to guys staring at my ass. But I never got to like it, as this guy seems to do. He's either queer or a total asshole. Maybe both.

If you want to see the pernicious effect of a unionized labor elite, just look at France and General Motors. Undermining the power of big unions is just as important as undermining the power of big corporations. When auto workers and French citizens are protected far beyond what any other people in the world have, it is essentially robbing the rest of us. You are worth precisely what your replacement will work for, not one cent more. Right now highly paid executives are in the catbird seat, but this will not last forever. If the Democrats ever get their act together and identify the real problems of the US, and stop protecting their clients, they might just undo some of the evil the Republicans have wrought. They aren't even close yet.