I'm very disappointed that someone as progressive and intelligent as Ron Wyden would say something so ridiculous. It just goes to show that every politician has to pander sometimes.

Wow, I didn't know that Lou Dobbs talked about anything other than immigration. That's all I hear him talking about when I tuned into his show. Good to know that he does have other interests.

The only way fuel conservation in the First World will ever be anything other than symbolic, is to institute *draconian* measures to limit fossil-fuel consumption, and then trumpet those measures to the rest of the world, in effect, shaming China and India into conservation measures too. It might even work.

Because fossil-fuels are totally fungible: what we don't use, someone else will. The *whole world* has to conserve, otherwise, all we're doing it moving the fuel around a little more.

Additionally, draconian measures are now just about all that are left to us. North American natural-gas supplies are poised to dive over a cliff in the next five years. Natural gas fields do not deplete gradually like oil fields. Basically, one minute you get full pressure, the next minute, you get zip. Of course, we have a lot of natural gas, but all the major sources are at the edge of decline. And that decline will be rapid.

Conservation buys us time. Time we can use to at least attempt to soften the permanent decline in fossil-fuels that will inevitably follow the Peak...the Peak we are experiencing right now. We're in it folks...or, rather, the plateau that follows the Peak, according to theory and practice. World fossil-fuel production probably peaked last year at about 85-million-barrels a day. It is quite likely, if not certain, that we will never again see that level of world production.

Conservation, meaningful conservation, will prolong the party a little longer. That's about it though.

It's going to be interesting times, by-and-by, as the Chinese curse has it.

20 years ago, timber companies announced massive layoffs (at the same time as they started automating cutting yards. The reason: government restrictions on cutting down trees (oddly, this coincided with record timber harvests).

6 years ago, California's electric grid was gamed, ultimately costing the state billions. The reason: government restrictions on building power plants.

Now, gasoline companies are claiming that they have shortages of fuel and must raise the prices. The reason: government restrictions on building new refineries.

This is a win-win for conservatives. Their donors make record profits. "Big Government" is demonized, allowing them to privatize more government activities, which allows their donors to make even more money. And we keep falling for it, again and again. All it takes is a public ignorant enough to accept anything corporations say, and a media which is completely owned by the businesses which profit from the game.

In all the reporting about Bloomberg's hybrid demands I haven't seen anyone question the idea of naming a specific technology in the proposed law.

It's clearly bad policy to name a technology in a law. Hybrids are not the only way to get more miles for less energy. Why not prescribe a minimum miles-per-gallon for a taxicab fleet, or better still, an maximum energy usage per passenger mile, and then let the taxicab companies figure out how best to meet those requirements.

There are diesel and all-electric technologies out there that are many times more efficient than the current crop of hybrids. And how about using mobile phones to facilitate taxi-sharing for longer rides (such as to JFK.)

By naming hybrids as the solution Bloomberg gets a few days of benevolent press coverage but misses an opportunity to help the development of technologies many times more efficient than hybrid gas/electric.