so I think you can pretty much rely on them doing something to try and prevent this situation from occuring.

... then the oil companies won't want to make a hefty investment in deep-water exploration and drilling on the North American continental shelf. Businesses don't like to make investments unless they're fairly certain of a profit.

The theory seems to be that if the price of gasoline is allowed to rise high enough, oil consumers will learn to conserve and the ingenuity of the free markets will create all sorts of oil substitutes.

Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan told Charlie Rose the other day that the greatest tragedy would be to allow the price of oil to go back down because the markets will not invest and innovate unless they can project *sustained* higher oil prices.

I have been a believer in this theory, but I am troubled by something...Gasoline in Europe is $8+ per gallon and $12 per gallon in Turkey. Most of that cost is taxes. Why haven't they introduced more electric cars, particularly in Europe where they have been building lots of nuclear plants.

Europe has a long history of "getting" energy conservation. Shorter travel distances. Good transit within and between cities and widespread acceptance of public transit. Appropriate use of smaller cars, scooters, etc. Not tearing-down and rebuilding homes every 30 years.

If electric cars are everything their proponents say they are, why haven't the Europeans caught on? Or are electric cars just the next Great American Boondoggle? Just wondering.

Many years ago some one discovered that the oil from the jojoba bean (Indigenous to America) could lubricate all of our machinery . Including auto engines . A crank case full of this bean oil would mean just change the filter and top off the oil . Production of this bean oil would bring the crude oil prices down to 1930's prices and the speculators would be jumping out the windows . This bean grows well in most of north and south America . The petro and auto companies have designed the auto in a way to make it difficult to burn anything other than gasoline and in doing so have increased the cost of auto production parts greatly . So why fret over fuel , lets start with the other products which require no modifications to the auto .

but then they aren't and have never been as car dependent as the US. There is a lot of evidence that with a big investement there are different ways to power personal transportation.

so the benefits of doing things differently might just be greater here.

If electric cars are everything their proponents say they are, why haven't the Europeans caught on?

I don't know, but I have a guess: There wasn't enough motivation to develop better battery technology until the fairly recent boom in portable electronic devices. I think the auto makers didn't want to do the heavy research themselves because gasoline was good enough and alternative transportation was readily available. Electronics makers had to bite the bullet because they didn't have an alternative.

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.

Why no European Sun Powered Cars? Because everyone else is ahead of 'energy' in the line of people taking those tax dollars out. Health care, welfare, high structural unemployment benefits, education, etc etc etc. They don't tax oil in order to be altruistic, they tax it because demand is largely price inelastic and they can count on it as reliable revenue stream in order to fund CURRENT obligations.

I'm not suggesting that the European gas taxes should be used to develop electric cars. These days, investment capital knows few borders and markets are very effective at sniffing out opportunities wherever they may be.

A few facts about the European Union (from Wikipedia):

--The population of the EU is 495 million, as of January 2007 (compared with 303 million in the U.S.).

--The GDP of the 27 EU nations was approx. $16.8 trillion in 2007 (compared with $13.8 trillion in the United States).

--The European Union is the world's largest importer of oil and natural gas.

--The EU adopted a draft energy policy in January 2007.

The preceding statistics indicate that the European Union is much larger than the United States, both in terms of population and total size of the economy. It seems unlikely that any failure to develop electric cars is due to a too-small market.

The EU imports a lot of fossil fuels and could benefit from reducing the cost of energy use. The density of the European population appears to be well suited to Electric cars.

The EU has adopted a draft energy policy, which indicates that they take this issue much more seriously than our elected representatives do.

I think the price of gasoline is more elastic than you suggest. As I pointed-out in my previous post, Europeans are generally much more careful with their use of expensive gasoline Americans than are with cheap gasoline. And it isn't just geographic/cultural differences...$4 per gallon seems to have registered with a lot of Americans. How many people would you guess have cancelled road trips this summer? I had never heard of a "staycation" until a few weeks ago.

I can tell you that I have reduced miles driven, am driving more slowly, and am looking at other ways to reduce energy use.

It is not my purpose to discredit the idea of electric cars. However, if we want to know how America might deal with high oil prices, it would be worthwhile to look at Europe as they already have much higher gasoline prices. If electric cars don't make sense for Europeans at $8/gallon with short travel distances, at what gas price would electric cars make sense for American drivers?