95 percent of world wide oil production is completely owned or controlled by governments (countries). Only 5 percent of world oil is produced by private business (greedy business, I think not). Currently there are 42,000,000 gasoline automobile driven just within the boundaries of the United sates; all require fuel every day. Oil will be needed (required) for many, many, many generations yet to come. Certainly, the world will some day run out of oil (we will all be long dead by that time) and another energy sources will be needed. Solar, will never fulfill that source, Perhaps nuclear, hydrogen, or as yet, some other type of unknown energy break through. Until then, it is oil, and I am grateful for it. - Millet

Non-democratic governments that are enriching only their few leaders and the oil tycoons are synonyms, BTW. And with their croonies jacking up prices in the futures trades, they all are greedy indeed.

This time you are dead wrong on your speculation about oil. The trend to get rid most of it is now unstoppable. The writings are all over the place. Meanwhile, feel free to bathe in oil.

There will be a transition, a painful one. This generation will only feel the birth pangs of the transition.

Todate, we have all the Solar technologies to start fully replacing oil if we only count the energy value. It is the human side of avoiding the current pain of inconvenience that is stopping us.

Come on Joe Real! You are repeating the leftist, socialist, anti-free enterprise pronouncements of the liberal press/public school/college professor elitists. I thought socialism died with the demise of the Soviet Union, but it appears still alive here in the old USA. I believe the Soviets proved once and for all that the ordinary person is not motivated by patriotism and the common good. Rather, human beings are motivated by self interest, or another word for it is "motivated by greed without bounds." Where was the big conspiracy when oil prices tanked in the 1980s? The "oil tycoons" could do nothing to prevent the crash as it was due to supply and demand as is the current relatively high price(actually not so high if you compare the current average wage with what it was in 1980 when gas was $1 a gallon.) As for speculators, I thank them. Not so much now as during the good times that they horded abundance so that when the lean times came someone had saved some supply to put into the market. The price of any commodity depends not only on supply and demand but the perception of human beings. The perception now is that the demand for oil is outstripping supply. Makes sense to me as China and India's demand for oil is growing exponentially. Only the free market can resolve such an issue, like higher prices reducing demand. Of course this has been proven time and time again, but it takes time. Americans can't abandon their gigantic SUVs and pickups gotten in the cheap energy 1990s fast enough to reduce prices very fast. It will happen though. Government can only make the problem worse by meddling in the market place. How about the stupid federal government EPA reducing the supply of gasoline and diesel by demanding such low levels of pollutants? The whole country is not a cesspool of air pollution as California is. Where I work it has reduced capacity to produce and supply of gasoline from a peak of greater than 8 million gallons a day to less than 6 million gallons a day. How about the real estate bubble? It seems to me the existing home owners or "home tycoons" in California were in a conspiracy and "motivated by greed without bounds" to inflate the price of their home to make as much money as could be made. Of course government did as much as it could to encourage the housing bubble by keeping interest rates artificially low for far too long after 9-11 to keep the economy from tanking and deflating and reducing the supply of homes by restricting home building(for the common good of course). In my humble opinion, it is going to take energy supplies from all economic sources in the future, oil, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, biomass, etc, etc to supply the world's voracious and increasing demands for energy.

One real plus for us is that America has tremendous supplies of coal. America will be a world leader in coal for many years into the future. Currently, 35 one hundred car coal trains go past our farm every day, heading to eastern cities. Each car carries 50-tons of coal. Again we can count our blessings for our coal reserves. Mr. Texas is correct when he puts some of the blame on the EPA. EPA's forced custom gasoline blends for different areas of the country has cause a reduction in domestic supply and has also caused some of the price increase. Environmentalists have also contributed to much of the reduction of domestic product. However, we must always remember, it is NOT OUR OIL, most of the oil we use belongs to OTHER countries, it's not ours, and they have every right to sell THEIR OIL for what ever price they wish. If we refuse to drill our own oil, we then must buy from countries that DO DRILL their oil. It time for Americans to stop whining and crying about the price of gas, and get our government to wake up. America's largest supplier of oil is not the Arabs, it is Canada. Every American should say, "Thank God for the wisdom and good business sense of our neighbors the Canadians". - Millet