Gail,
The posing of questions such as the ones you have, are what make TOD a truly interesting destination for broad interdisciplinary observation, debate, and commentary.

"if there is hope, it lies with the proles." Orwell

2. Can technology solve our all our problems?

I can't answer this here, but I did just finish up a blog post on stuff I am working on in the context of belief systems predicated on rational outcomes. In it I wrote "if you seek rationality, you will ultimately only land on random chance."
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/06/mentaculus.html
Enjoy, because we all have to laugh at ourselves.

I want to second what was said above - thanks to Gail, Prof. Goose, Leanan as well as the regular posters who make this site so valuable.

Beyond that, I just wanted to quibble with "the oil supply that everyone has told us was available". Credible skeptics have been sounding alarms about oil supply for a good long while. Admittedly, mainstream sources have been pretty unanimous in promising free ponies forever, but anyone who cared to do their own research and thinking could see where we have been heading for decades. I'd say take everything you read in the papers with a grain of salt.

Preferably many grains of salt, encircling a margarita.

"Is there a way we can even out this [income] inequality, so that the resources we have could be shared better."

Yes, there is a way: Implement Milton Friedman's negative income tax proposal. Nixon came very close to backing legislation for a negative income tax back in the early seventies, before the rise in the price in oil. With stagflation the proposal was dead in the political water.

The negative income tax, in my opinion, is the best response we can make to long-term unemployment. It gives strong incentives to work, but at the same time it allows unemployed people to eat and to pay a modest rent--to live a decent, though not abundant, life. Economists like the idea of the negative income tax because of its elegant simplicity. It would be administered by the Bureau of Internal revenue. Unfortunately establishment politics favors the current mishmash of expensive and malfunctioning income redistribution programs.

In terms of economics, the negative income tax makes a lot of sense. Politically, it cannot fly now, but who knows what our political landscape will look like after 2012?

To address the predicament of declining fossil fuel energy and declining GDP over the long term we must face squarely the problem of income redistribution.

1) I prefer not to have a belief system related to the particulars of energy use and development, and would rather stick with science, facts, research, evaluating the opinions of objective experts, etc etc. Not being intimate with some of the code sometimes used at particular forums, is "belief system" related to Rapture in some way?

2) See 1) above. And no, I don't think income inequality has much to do with belief systems either, at least not religious ones. Hard work, personal responsibility, natural ability and intelligence, those items might be more related to the income question.

3) I agree with the Rothschilds on this one. Blood in the streets is the time to buy and when there is money to be made, bubbles are for suckers. Real estate speculation, targeted market investments, all make quite a bit of sense during downturns.

And this sentence is a little fuzzy:

The reserves of oil companies and of the USGS depend on resources like this.

The USGS doesn't do reserves, but the oil companies do. The sentence makes it seem like the USGS has its own reserves or something to that effect. The USGS does evaluate resource potential:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3027/

"assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources"

but that isn't reserves.

I never put my trust in the man made systems around us. For me nothing has changed I still Believe in Christ, what has changed is that now I have proof why we should never trust man's wisdom over God's wisdom.

But that being said, I know people that are being shaken to their cores with all the ills going on in the world, and how some of them are scared for themselves and others around them. To many of them Trusted the Gov't of the USA to be there to watch their backs. When you know that systems of Gov't are made up of people, and that people by and large start to watch out for themselves over time. You understand that the system will fail more often than not.

I know that I am not prefect, that I get selfish from time to time, that my actions aren't on a level that can be trusted to not hurt others. Even my dad who really tries to watch out for others, can be prone to be selfish, and he is the best example I have to base my ideas on. My parents still fuss and fight about opinions and such, and when I see that happen I realize that human nature is not going to solve our problems.

Now to your questions.

1. see above.

2. The only way to even things out, is to make sure everyone gets at least the needs of the day met. The USA still has a homeless population, people that fell through the cracks in the system, to many good people don't want homeless people in their nieghborhoods, I see that a lot around here. Where a homeless person or even a person that is not homeless but is on the edge of being so, is being slowly pushed away from the general population because they are not wanted by the rest of the population, like homelessness is a sickness you might catch.

When landlords price houses out of the market for a decent living wage to support. Right now 40 million people living on food stamps, and half that number living without work, and being marginalized. Thousands of homes empty while people live under bridges, or in shabby trailers because that is all they can afford. There is no easy way to say, wave the magic wand and everyone has a nice house, food on the table and a job to go too.

I'd like to see more land available to build sustainable housing on, and put some of my designs to use. There are other people out there who have sustainable living arrangements waiting to get more land for use. There are some programs out there that help the homeless, and programs that help people get affordable housing, more funding to them would be a start in the right direction.

3, Recent events are bringing more of the this plight to the forefront of US minds. Less american Idol more plight of your fellow man. Not nearly enough though. Still too many people walk the other way when they see something they don't like happening.

My $0.019125 worth, an inflation adjusted number.

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.
hugs from arkansas.

The spill in the GOM has shown me there is a Stupendous amount of oil there. A 21" pipe have at a pressure of some 20,000 psi at the failed BOP is one hell of a gusher. Looks to me like the experts have severely underestimated the "proven" reserves in this case.

Had not some BP idiots taken all the possible shortcuts in safety they would be sitting pretty right now. A one month & $26 million over run looks mighty puny these days, does it not?

Regarding questions 1-4, No, No, No, No

Have my beliefs changed - NO I would have said No to all of those many years back.

Gail -

The answer to your question as to whether businesses can be expected to regulate themselves should be self-evident: a resounding NO!

Throughout a career spanning over four decades, I have seen first-hand the environmental protection practices of American industry in those pre-environmental years of the 1950 and 1960s ..... it was essentially non-existent. And quite blatantly so. What they could get away with without overtly killing anybody, they did. The attitude was: everybody else is dumping stuff into the air, water, and ground, so why shouldn't we? For if not, then we'd be at a competitive disadvantage. Same old story. American industry fought tooth and nail against even the most minimal environmental regulation. Just can't trust the bastards.

No, we cannot depend on the oil supply everyone told us was available. That should be painfully obvious by now. Whether it be war in the Middle East or massive oil releases in the Gulf, the obtaining, processing, and distributing of our oil 'reserves' is becoming increasingly problematic on so many levels.

To answer your questions:

1) No, recent events have not changed my belief one iota. I believe that, whatever machinations are used to rationalize it, we are going to strip every molecule of available reduced carbon from this earth and burn it to produce energy until there is none left.

2) If there is any shift toward a different belief system, I think it will the exact opposite of increased sharing, and more toward increased clawing and scratching to get as much of the goodies for one's own whilst one can. War is part of this belief system, particularly in the US.

3) I see little if any opportunities from recent events. Sure, some people will exploit the situation for their own economic and/or political gain, but I have a very hard time seeing much good coming out of it for society in general (not that I'm all that sure there really is such a thing as an 'upper case' Society to begin with). It is all individuals looking after their own self interests.

Does anyone really believe that after all is said and done, that we are really going to cease drilling for oil in the deep water Gulf?

By the way, you have repeatedly harped on the huge amount of infrastructure needed to construct and maintain offshore wind power. Well, have you taken a good look at the size and complexity of those monstrous (and montrously ugly, in my opinion) support vessels that service the offshore oil platforms? In terms of technological complexity, comparing offshore wind to offshore oil is like comparing an ox cart to a space shuttle. Now how sustainable is offshore deep water oil?

Something I'm working on:

1. How have the recent events affected your beliefs?

"Yet another 'D'Oh!'.": So what else is new.

To quote myself elsewhere:
"Are we really that stupid that we not only can destroy our
planet-- our only home-- with intelligence and our own hands-- and
really fast-- including killing entire species/ecosystems, and risk
our own survival as a species in the process?

Or is our supposed intelligence the paradox that ultimately renders
the conditions that kill us off?"

From 'Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast' You Tube video:
"Understanding exponential growth as a fundamental driver of global
warming, environmental destruction, peak oil and natural gas, water
and arable land shortages, social decay, resource wars, etc.."
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM1x4RljmnE

2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs toward some more helpful belief systems? For example, if there is going to be less, an attitude of sharing what we have might be helpful. Income Inequality in the US is very high. Is there a way we can even out this inequality, so that the resources we have could be shared better?

The Tribe Of Pangaea...

3. What opportunities do you see from the recent events?

T.O.P. :)

...Greater (sustainable) human energies (efforts) toward all roots-- grass and otherwise-- community, permaculture, redefinitions and/or debates around the concept/semantics of 'power', 'profit', 'debt' or 'money' etc.; localization/decentralization (at least where appropriate); all-inclusive-self-governance/("glocal" one-world/multiple localities self-governance); freedom-to-roam/increasing borderlessness for people (in keeping with the earth's systems as a whole, such as bird-migrations and climate); steady state economics/local currencies/community-ethical banks (no interest or fractional reserves perhaps?); increasing debates/redefinitions/critiques on technology-necessity-quality-approach/morals-and-ethics/mass-production(i.e.,factory farms)/work/overwork/meaningful-work/efficient-work/less-work/leisure/fun/play/nature/peace/peace-and-quiet/family; and so forth.

where is campfire? i got to go to bed. tomorrow I got to pick peas, shell them, blanch them and put them up. Plus there is squash, okra, cucumbers, and corn. me thinks most here just talk about getting ready for what is before us. I really wonder if folks know what it takes to become sustainable? Well, go out and look at the sunset. It's the most important part. Seth is defeating Horace. In a few hours it will all change. Then it is time to again get to work. Want to survive?

Gail,
Of course deregulation was a mistake, especially in a time of resource constraints.

Deregulation is only half the story.

The government fed those unleashed(unregulated) market forces by loosening the money supply.
Business got lower taxes and the government let the debt pile up so as to let the economy grow.
In capitalism, the investor is allowed to reap his gains but wage growth threatens an 'inflationary spiral'.
Economic inequality was justified by the idea that investors allocate better then the government leading
to the financial(imaginary where nobody makes anything) economy and globalization.

This was the Greenspan vision.

“Well, Brooksley, I guess you and I will never agree about fraud,” Born, in a recent interview, remembers Greenspan saying.

“What is there not to agree on?” Born says she replied.

“Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud,” she recalls. Greenspan, Born says, believed the market would take care of itself.

For the incoming regulator, the meeting was a wake-up call. “That underscored to me how absolutist Alan was in his opposition to any regulation,” she said in the interview.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2009/marapr/features/born.html

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve didn't understand the word, 'fraud'?

No words.

Once upon a time, back in the pre-Reagan era, capitalism and profits didn't seem to have quite the emphasis they have today in the the way the country functioned.

One of the things that has happened between then and now is the background of the people running the companies. During your "once upon a time" era, the CEO was, more often than not, related to the company founders, or had a very long history with the company. More recently, the CEO is likely a "hired gun" brought in to run the company for a relatively brief period of time. There have been a number of studies showing that CEO longevity has been decreasing steadily.

It makes a difference.

I will second Don's call for a negative income tax or something similar. Implement it by giving everyone a credit and pay for it by increasing the progressivity of the tax system. It could be a lot more progressive and still not be anything close to what it was in the 1950s. The net cost might very well be not that high if one simultaneously eliminated all other income transfer programs, including social security.

There would also be additional savings because of the efficient nature of this scheme compared to the hodgepodge of transfer programs we currently have, including food stamps and unemployment insurance.

The traditional argument against any significant transfer of income, especially one where people might actually be able to survive on said program, is that it will disincentivize work. While this might very well be true for some people, those who desire a middle or higher level of income would not be affected as they would still desire all the things that come with a higher income, including status and a better place to live.

Even if it could be shown that the desire to work would be significant, this would actually be a point in the scheme's favor. Our problem is not lack of productivity, but too much productivity and too much consumption. We need to cut back on consumption, so it certainly would not hurt to cut back on production. Besides, it is not like we are able, anyway, to provide work to all comers under the current system.

Some apparently are suspicious of this idea because it was generated by Milton Friedman. I have very little use for most of Friedman's ideas, but a good idea is a good one, regardless of the source. As a raving liberal and a Keynesian, I supported this proposal back in the 1970s and support it now. I recognize Friedman's role in South America and generally detest him, but at least there is an advantage that one can use a conservative's ideas to argue against conservatives, most of whom would not like the negative income tax or any other income redistribution scheme.

Anyway, providing some basic level of income, come hell or high water, come boom or bust, is essential for a no or low growth economy. The growth economy thrives on income inequality and is said to be necessary to provide income to the poor through the trickle down effect. Unfortunately, inequality has increased over the years despite the growth and as a result of our overemphasis on finance as a source of wealth.

The powers that be in the gulf area are complaining vociferously about the oil drilling moratorium. Despite this total disaster, there seems to be little talk about changing our lifestyle or engaging in a crash program to transition to alternatives. Unfortunately, there will be a narrow focus where we just study what went wrong and supposedly come up with fixes and contingency plans for the future.

But, more to the point, what is the contingency plan for a society that could have dramatically less oil available in the coming years? I fear the contingency plan is to use a lot more coal, which has its own horrible impacts, including mining disasters, mountain top removal, destruction of entire towns, and massive carbon emissions, to just name a few problems.

Recent events have made me even less hopeful about the future. The irresponsibility and venality of the regulatory system is totally appalling.

The questions:

• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

What business "regulates itself"? I'm in what is known currently as an "unregulated business", and I literally have MILLIONS OF WORDS in the tax code, labor regulations, even myriad rules about how I interact with, and treat customers. I face threat of lawsuit at the smallest inconvenience to members of the public, and even have been blamed for the actions of people not related to me, or even my customers.

Every credible description I can find of the nature of the events that lead to the disaster revolves not around lacking regulation, but people being complacent and making bad, but in themselves not apparently easily amenable to regulated decisions. I find no merit at all in the idea, aside from emotional manipulation, that 'deregulation' is in any way responsible for this. As has been pointed out many times, the real issue here is a lack of personal accountability on the part of decisionmakers - like the military, failures are always blamed on the higher-ups, as if they're omnipresent. Noone has demonstrated that the best practice procedures developed by the industry itself are anything but extraordinarily good and competent. It seems what's at issue, is that there are decisionmakers given discretion to make decisions who lack accountability to much of anyone, yet the results of their failure are widespread.

• Can technology solve our all our problems?

If it can't, there's no solution. Some problems, like, having to work to eat, are not meant to be "solved". They're simply the nature of life. Other "problems" are often invented, some are mis-stated, and others are very real - like lacking water in some places, energy in others, etc. Some are created, like ignorant mining from the turn of the century over a century ago, that now fouls water in places. These problems have ONLY technological answers.

Many advocate "lifestyle" changes, some forced, to alleviate what they see as problems, but give no thought as to the real life consequences. For instance, the invention of the gasoline engine was a godsend to the pollution problems of cities, who were all but drowning in horrendous air, water, ground, and other pollution due to animals. Technology gave us the means of improving ICE emissions to the point they are now irrelevant. The use of energy to do things is what has given us the means of living in a very clean environment, for instance.

Perhaps we should lean from nature. Every living thing "spoils its nest" so to speak. And thus, nature punishes, or more correctly, naturally ends "concentration" of any living thing in one place. There's many other lessons to learn from observation, as well. Sadly, most conflict with the environmental movement, and will never be learned.

• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?

Solutions to what? The rapidity with which needs are filled rests upon two things... the freedom of individuals to find answers and the availablity of the means of searching, and the motivation those individuals have to find answers. We no longer have room for Thomas Edisons in our society. No longer can individuals live lives in pursuit of answers. Instead, we work at some income-producing "job" and then 90% of what we earn is consumed by mere financial survival. 80% to pay someone else for necessities, government mandated expenditures, and for redistribution to non-producers, and if you're wise, 10% to save for your age of infirmity. The other 10% we can safely risk. Perhaps these ratios do not apply to wealthy people, if you wish to argue about them, but they're not incentivized to risk their wealth, either, they're punished for doing anything with a "return" unless it's loaning it to the government.

Thus, research and development has become "corporate". Public funding of research is geared to obtaining more funding for research - no results are required, and private funding which has a high risk is punitively treated. We have literally locked ourselves into what we have by means of social and tax policy. You want change? Fine, you're going to have to unlock society, which means many things.

• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here?

Depend on what? That it's there? It's there and there's more than we think there is. Does this mean it's unlimited? Of course not. But until or unless our present social and tax structure is altered dramatically, there will be no alternatives possible.

I'm one of the old fart TODers. I thought there was hope in the late '60s through mid '70s. But, change was coopted. So, in essence, I've considered this stuff for over 40 years.

It is too late now and "hope" will destroy a lot of people needlessly. I hate to use this phrase, but all this is nothing more than mental masturbation. There was a chance for change without a dieoff and, essentially, a revolution.

Good luck.

Todd

It used to be fun to think about where we'll be forty or fifty years from now, all those imaginings of high-tech oozie-whatzits propelling us about the universe. Sure we all have them (based on what we think we know), however we live in a highly dynamic world, so future-beliefs must be subject to change as well.

A few weeks ago, I had a belief that someone in MSM might ask, "Why are we drilling in 5000 feet of water anyway?" Ah, well. Good to HAVE beliefs, but if they're wrong, or no-one else in your immediate circle has them, well...

In the past I would have agreed having solid beliefs should help carve the path to a rewarding future, spiritually or otherwise. These days it seems, wishy-washy "hope" is a more dominate force, which is kinda spooky. Otherwise known as "crossing fingers" (or faith, "fingers and toes"), having hope is generally a silly way to live. Having said that, hoping for beautiful sunsets and water fresh enough for the grand-kids to swim, still sounds reasonable.

Certainly beliefs change over time and perhaps pollies have the best understanding of this. Perhaps they're the ones to lead us afterall?

:)

Regards, Matt B

PS. The thing I have always thought odd is how even the smartest of us (not me, for sure!) continue to use trend charts as some sort of guide for future beliefs. Maybe in the short term this is OK, but not long. How can anyone take a pencil and draw any sort of accurate line to 2020? (That's a blink of an eye away). Any chart-of-the-day is already history and all those dashed lines into the future are, in all fairness, simply a best guess.

Been in a rambling mood this week. Sorry about that.

About "beliefs". My "beliefs" are unchanged in any way. There are certain things I believe because they are credible. Some things I believe because I have personal experience that makes them credible * to me *, though not necessarily anyone else. If this event in the gulf changed some belief you hold, I'd have to ask what you based your beliefs upon before?

For instance, I believe if I go outside and stick the key in my truck and turn it, it will start. That belief is born of many many years of practice. I know that sometimes it does not. For instance, I've left the lights on, and the battery was dead. Still, the reliability of the system which makes it start has been proven. Not only that, I know the science behind the technology intimately, I have no reason to doubt it.

I note with interest the discussion of "peak oil". Some argue it's now, some later, some say it's past. If you have statistical evidence to suppor any of those conclusions, then someone making bad decisions about a well drilled in the Gulf of Mexico has absolutely no relevance. Either your observation of the facts of an apparently finite resource are true or not, regardless. Like believing my truck will start, it should be based on simple facts and a relatively straightforward reasoned analysis.

As far as "income inequality" goes, I cannot imagine how it is a symptom of anything other than being human. After all, the lowest you can go is 0, and the highest you can go is limited by what you do. Where you land, in relationship to those endpoints is mostly a matter of the quality of your efforts and decisionmaking over the course of your life, combined at times, with random chance. It would seem that if people are making vast sums of money for doing something, far beyond any comprehension of "earning it", then perhaps the issue is one of lacking competition. I know nothing better than competition for reducing wasteful expenditures by any enterprise.

Can businesses regulate themselves?

No, and they should not be expected to.

Also I think your time scale regarding the the emphasis of capitalism is too short. If you go back, say 150 years you will see that we have been progressively de-emphasizing capitalism and profits for quite a while.

Can technology solve all of out problems?

No. I do not think technology will ever be able to eliminate our main problem - ignorance.

I am not sure why you think Scientific American or Steven Chu are telling us that technology will solve all of our problems. Clearly both sources will tell you that the 3 laws of thermodynamics are always in play, which right there puts huge limits on what technology can do.

If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?

Well, to be facetious, you can expect that, and in fact there seems to be a lot of expecting that right now.

But you will be greatly disappointed if you do expect that.

Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is available?

If you mean the increasingly scarce reserves that we already know about, sure. The cost just went up, that is all.

As for your questions:

1. How have the recent events affected your beliefs?

Really not a lot. I've had a naturalistic world view for quite a while, so things like the BP Spill aren't a big surprise to me.

Events did lead me to this site though, and this place does have the potential to affect my beliefs over the longer term.

2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs toward some more helpful belief systems? For example, if there is going to be less, an attitude of sharing what we have might be helpful. Income Inequality in the US is very high. Is there a way we can even out this inequality, so that the resources we have could be shared better?

Well, I think meritocracy is important. Nature doesn't reward the weak and ignorant, and a society must conform to the reality of natural law or it will fail or be overrun by a society that does a better job of aligning with reality.

If I were to pick mechanisms to improve the current situation it would be through inheritance or estate taxes and through education. People should not inherit vast wealth that arises from the efforts of others and likewise our society has a big problem in that it does not offer about 20% of the population any opportunity for self-realization, and it does not teach the ideas of naturalism.

3. What opportunities do you see from the recent events?

Not a lot. The problems we have are to entrenched to be solved as a reaction to something like the BP spill.

Some of the issues I see are:

1. Poor structure of government that hides or distorts costs in the economic system. The BP spill is a clear case of what happens as a result. More so is the problem of squandering resources - We may come to a time when we have the knowledge to do great things but lack the resources.

2. Education that de-emphasizes understanding of natural laws, their limitations and the consequences of ignoring the limitations.

3. Use of religion as a crutch when the problems at hand are addressable only by application of natural law.

It is hard to see how a oil spill is going to cause enough of a paradigm shift to address these issues.

<1. How have the recent events affected your beliefs?>

I believe things are speeding up, becoming unchangeable, the train is starting to run right over the 'bridge out' sign. Not too long ago, I thought there might be more time, less abrupt.

<2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs toward some more helpful belief systems? For example, if there is going to be less, an attitude of sharing what we have might be helpful. Income Inequality in the US is very high. Is there a way we can even out this inequality, so that the resources we have could be shared better?>

There are too damn many of us. We can believe in sharing & caring and a higher purpose, but then some folks with less food, shelter, income and more sense of desperation will skip the voluntary part and balance the inequity themselves. If we had leaders who meant us to get through this, and we had a exponentially smaller population, we could all live in Ecotopia. But we're a greedy broken species and people profit by keeping us that way.

<3. What opportunities do you see from the recent events?>

"Doomerism" has become more acceptable. It makes it easier to talk to friends & family about planning ahead which helps us circle our wagons so to speak. It's been a good impetus to get more of my 'tribe' taking care of themsleves and thinking about the bigger picture.

I was shocked as anyone that this spill could happen to this extent. But I was shocked when the Challenger blew up, when Toyota cars accelerated on their own, and when Bernie Maddoff stole 18 Billion dollars.

The questions you ask, Gail, remind me to other terrible situations where I was not shocked- not shocked that hundreds of thousands died in places like Haiti and Indonesia where authoritarian governments led to substandard economies and housing standards; not shocked when millions may have starved in North Korea while agricultural production has plummeted in Zimbabwe (plenty of oversight there); and not shocked when the cries for slower growth in response to "suburban sprawl" and "global warming" and an "overheated economy", combined with the promise of more regulation (higher minimum wages), higher taxes (cap gains, inheritance, investor class), and "change" has led to record unemployment amongst young people, soaring bankruptcies, and massive underemployment- even while record deficits and Keynesian stimulus has been brought to bear.

Free enterprise can lead to the deaths of people- by the dozens or hundreds. Government regulation and the law of unintended consequences has shown the ability to kill millions. And the great thing about capitalism is it creates rich people. People who's unique desires for things like portable phones, flying, and indoor plumbing create the technology for tomorrow's middle class to improve their lives. And that technology is responsible for people living twice as long as we used to.

Not to mention rich people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates can apply the profits they've made delivering new services and technology to helping others by working on improved education, clean water, mosquito nets- or building libraries. Smart people tend to do those things, in addition to giving employees raises and the other things business owners like to do when they make money. Bureaucrats, on the other hand...

Sure, there are $30K suitcases- but someone created that "art" and is getting paid for it. Would you rather they be given the money for doing nothing at all?

I happened to be reading this thread while listening to Creedence doing "Born on the Bayou." The line in that song got me Googling "hoodoo," and in one definition it's listed as a religious theme of retribution.
Fat chance the bible-thumpers will pick up on it, but maybe this is the divine message they all seek.
No question, this is a disaster of biblical proportions.
Bad juju.

Tom Friedman has really turned in the wind like a weathervane since the Lexus and the Olive Tree and the World is Flat...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13friedman.html?hp

Unfortunately, there will be no widespread societal change without buy-in from TPTB.

CAN BUSINESS REGULATE ITSELF?

I think Sir Nicholas Stern summed this up best with this comment regarding the study he completed for the British Parliament on the costs of climate change to humanity.

"the biggest market failure the world has ever seen"

We have little time to get this response right. Of course, there is no "self-regulation" path. There never has been.

This oil calamity had better mark a turning point for the delusion that many people hold on this question. But I am not optimistic that we will collectively learn from the oil calamity - our institutions are too busted.

1. Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

The goal of business is to maximize return to the stock holders, by legal and ethical means. Any business that does not do this is not doing it’s job. It is the job of government to rein in business, by considering the cost to society from pollution, resource depletion, income inequality, health degradation, etc. It is also the job of society in general to reign in business by non governmental means.

The threat of lawsuits and penalties represents a real cost of doing bad business. Unfortunately, the total costs to society will never be captured in the courts. The cost of the Macondo blowout to BP will be beyond any potential cost savings. What I find more troubling is the smaller scale disasters such as leaks at Prudhoe bay and the Texas City refinery explosion that represent only a cost of doing business when profit is king. One need only look back 100 years to the mining industry, where a reduced life expectancy from black lung, silicosis, etc. was part of the job.

2. Can technology solve our all our problems?

Heck no. Unfortunately this has been the optimistic mantra of our society from the early days of the industrial revolution.

How have the recent events affected your beliefs?

I was a kid in Northern California when the 69 Santa Barbara spill occurred. To this day, California is wary of off sea drilling. I remember thinking when Obama this past winter favored off seal drilling that we had overcome the issues that led to that disaster. The recent blowout shows that no, the limitation is not technology, but the perceived safety that we feel from that technology. We are human, and will repeatedly make mistakes. Look back at the space shuttle explosions, and Apollo before that. Astronauts in the 60’s were out there – high reward with a reasonable risk of not making it back. By the time the 80’s rolled around, with the same technology space travel was deemed safe enough to send a teacher to space.

Carter launched the deregulation project, actually. To the extent it has any meaning whatsoever, Kennedy's one-liner about asking what you can do for you country rather than the reverse is a call for individualism, not public action. Obama is a fraud, through and through, who even now shows no sign of changing a damned thing. Have you heard him mention deregulation? Barely, if at all. He's going to play-act at concern and toughness, then restart deepwater drilling and go back to shagging for Wall Street money.

All in all, I'm alarmed by the huge gap between what our TOD leaders know about geology/ecology/energy/engineering and what they don't know about the basics of social structure, social psychology, and history.

Our problems are at least as much social and political as they are technical.

TPTB are going to finish fucking us, if we let them, which we will if we don't quickly get smart and honest about the nature and logic of their powers and privileges.

The answer to all 4 questions here is a huge No, obviously. Why pretend otherwise? Because this is where the water gets really hot really fast?

Following is a contribution to the art of "quad charts" (apologies to Meyers-Briggs and Gartner Group).

The X-axis refers to the person's style of decision making. The left end uses the legal system's approach, which ascertains truth by having people divide into camps and letting their advocates argue the matter out on the basis of whatever information can be brought forward, followed by a vote. The right end requires a consensual decision based on the collection and analysis of data, model building and testing, and general agreement on the best fit of models to the data.

The Y-axis refers to whether the person assumes the concrete objective existence of reality that obeys natural laws independent of any human wishes or desires, or whether the person assumes that humans can largely control the natural environment, either through some undefined collective activity or by engaging the help of some higher power.

I've put some typical occupations in the quadrants. Managers tend to be hard-headed, but they are used to making binary decisions on the basis of incomplete data. Engineers want all the data and they want to understand it and vet the models with their colleagues before deciding. Politicians engage in more wishful thinking than the managers. Environmentalists of the "lets all go to the Gulf and save all the birds" types are in the wishful thinking camp. They collect a lot of information but they are not too careful of the validity, although the scientists among them fit with the engineers, and those driven by particular causes fit with the politicians.

          |   Logical    |  Quantitative    |
          | Argumentative|   Consensual     |
          |              |                  |
----------||=============|=================||
          ||             |                 ||
Skeptical ||  Managers   |   Engineers     ||
Realists  ||             |                 ||
          ||             |                 ||
----------||-------------|-----------------||
          ||             |                 ||
Gullible  || Politicians |Environmentalists|| 
Believers ||             |                 ||
          ||             |                 ||
----------||=============|=================||

Great stuff!
"1. Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?" & "2. Can technology solve our all our problems?"
I believe the answers to the first two questions could be indicate where a person will stand on a broad range of issues. On cannot make a special case for oil or energy because the inconsistency would require more than intellectual gymnastics. Do we exempt medicine, space exploration or basic quality of life issues from objective and unbiased judgment?
A specific ethical discipline developed in response to capitalism and the industrial, technological and information revolutions. They must be subject to doubt and investigation because they can only be a means to progress.
When we cease to observe and experiment, science will fail to further knowledge.
It is only through doubt and mistrust that critical thinking does not cease so we become hostage to dogma and faith which is an end in itself.
It is more than irony that human caused catastrophe jolts our conscience as well as our intellect. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Titanic a year later sobered our entry into the 20th Century. One hundred years later we need to admit human fallibility. The consequences of hubris not only exist, the relationship between error and catastrophe means the latter will be more significant.

Thanks Gail.

1. Recent events have not changed our beliefs, but have made it clear that the direction my husband & I suspected things were moving in are, in fact, coming on quickly.

2. I think the best and most effective method is in our own local communities. For example, once we realized that we could harvest lots of vegetables in the dead of winter, we began to reach out to others who are already interested in growing their own food, but who haven't made the step away from depending on food coming from 1500 miles away in the winter. It seems easiest and most appropriate to work in small steps with immediate results, with people are going to be most interested. Likewise, the success of urban pea patch projects has been helpful to teach urban dwellers that they don't have to buy all of their food at the store. It's a very small, but tangible, step in the right direction.

3. Opportunities? The overall difficulty is that 1) the above may be too little, too late, and that 2) the MSP (as in main-stream population) doesn't get it. I think this is a wake-up call that will hit a few more people to amp up their learning curve. I hate to say it, but I think that the longer the GOM catastrophe continues - the greater will be the wake-up call. At least I hope so. BP has been very helpful in this regard. Had they opened up to the press and all interested parties, the GOM spill would have left the front pages long again -- but they've created a situation wherein the MSM is becoming more and more involved.

This has some shock value, which is what Americans seem to need.

BTW, One of the best books that I've come across is The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. They have comprehensively reviewed all of the activities that consumers, not industry itself, do that create "normal" and toxic pollution. They identify, the degree of water, soil, and air pollution.

This gives the user a great tool to really identify how, "I", as an individual, can help.

Hello, I've been on TOD for about a month to a month and a half. I'm not a scientist but rather a recent college graduate, and up till now I have been content to read articles by people who know a lot more than I do.

Firstly, I want to congratulate TOD, readers, and contributors, on making a very welcoming site, and one that breaks down complex topics/issues into a much more readable and understandable light.

Secondly, I am in a bit of a quandary as someone from the younger generation in the United States, and one who is likely going to have to deal with the decline of oil in my lifetime, it is obviously that in my best interests, along with many other people in the world, to do what we can to make a transition smooth.

2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs toward some more helpful belief systems? For example, if there is going to be less, an attitude of sharing what we have might be helpful. Income Inequality in the US is very high. Is there a way we can even out this inequality, so that the resources we have could be shared better?

I'm no expert, most of my knowledge comes from places like TOD, but it seems to me that the biggest problem with a shift into an attitude of sharing is that the gov't has no accountability. Referenced in this post was JFK's infamous, "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country". Since the time of JFK, I think we can all agree that there has been a remarkable shift from a unified country, to a country who is made up by many individuals, all of whom are striving to get ahead for themselves, and their little respective bubbles.

In this shift, it appears we (I use we in the most general sense, interpret it as you will - the general populace, mankind etc. etc.) have begun to forget that we all are in this together.

3. What opportunities do you see from the recent events?

It appears we are on a precipice. I quote from the article when I say: "One wonders too, what other problems lurk around the corner, in other deregulated industries." It seems that the country is at a possible turning point, with people waking up and realizing that we are living beyond are means.

Just yesterday, at my job, (currently working in the deli of a local supermarket, not glorious but it helps pay the bills) for the first time in a long time, I had a customer come up to me, and say: Have you heard about how awful the Gulf Spill is". Later that day, I had the same discussion with 2 - 3 other people, correcting them on a few facts that I have learned from TOD are either grossly over/under exaggerated in much of the reports on the gulf.

I live in a well off area, and we pretty much define living past our means. But if the Gulf Spill can have an impact on our sort of area, I wonder now exactly how much of an impact it can have. At this point I turn to myself and ask - well how did this happen? We've determined that it was from lack of accountability and overreaching by BP, and while the vast majority of the readership on this site can see the parallels between BP, and likely many other companies - I give the situation with Goldman Sach's as an example, does the general populace. If so is it enough to jolt people, like those in my area, out of their complacency and realize that accountability needs to be returned to the country...

I believe a unique opportunity has presented itself to this country...the question is are we going to use it?

Just a few meandering thoughts about the current situation: and again thank you to all who post/read/contribute in any way to this site :)

~Dawn

Your "Belief systems at a turning point" may be occurring now if you are a Repiglican or conservative. If you are an authoritarian follower who values loyalty above all else, you may have had many good reasons lately for your "belief systems" to be questioned:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

I suggest you move entirely away from "belief systems" and base your thoughts on facts wherever possible. If you find someone who's has been known to lie, on several occasions, then you should consider their credibility severely reduced.

The tree-huggers have never accepted unregulated capitalism, trickle-down economics, or drill-baby-drill. No, it's the rise of the reich-wing, religious right in America, starting with one of the worse presidents ever: Reagan. The 'southern strategy' to exploit racism, combined with phony economic theory based on greed (just what the elites love), has taken America straight into a ditch. Let's hope it's a 'turning point'. Finally.

Maybe we should start with teaching geography in schools. Once people understand just how limited our land mass is and how fragile the environment is on Earth maybe then we will take much better care of our home. But, that may be the most optimistic route, not the most immediate.

Take for instance the fact that our land area is only about a third of the entire globe. Then, distill it down to what limited natural resources there are to utilize or, a more apt term, exploit.

How much of the land is arable? Less and less with each generation. Some actually believe global warming (for those who admit that it does at all exist) could be a good thing. A National Geographic article recently featured Greenland where some crops are doing much better in warmer weather patterns. A downside of course is flooding and torrential rains that make farming a lot more difficult since the growing season is much shorter there than it is at lower latitudes.

The fact is, no matter how many do-gooders there are who want to preserve our resources and be good stewards of the Earth on which we all live, poverty, disease, famine, drought, hunger, wars and desertification of previously arable land are all making us ask questions about how we will survive for now and in the future.

The most visceral, but I think inevitable, course we will take is to use military might to protect and preserve what we have against those whose desperation will cause them to attack, even at great risk and odds against them, those who have more.

On the darker side, that same military power will end up being used to overpowe weaker countries and take by force those resources we need in order to endure.

Some may think, as technophiles like Energy Secretary Chu believe, our ingenuity will overcome all obstacles and solve all our needs. But, our primal instincts for survival will come down to one overriding solution -- Brute Force.

After all, in Afghanistan the Taliban are still using horses to fight the smartest, best equipped most technologically advanced military the world has seen. But we are still there after 8 years -- only because we don't have the stomach or the will to completely immolate our foes with the Brute Force we have available.

The questions posed at the beginning of this thread are easier to answer than taking the following step and asking where do we go from here. Especially after reading through all the 200 comments.

It is clear that the deregulation of private industry has been a failure as witnessed by the examples of Enron, BP, coal industry and our financial institutions. This BP disaster only reinforces this for most people.

So we see the failure of the private sector in self regulation. This brings us toward the public sector, or government to then take up the task of functioning as an unbiased and competent "regulator".

Do we believe that our government could free itself of the ways it is beholden of the private sector to ever function as an effective regulator?

I don't have "audacity of hope" or belief in our government's ability to function independent of the interests of the private sector.

So if we arrive to the conclusion of the incompetence of both our private and public sector we can then scan these 190 comments for where to turn? I see religion and the planting of beans being offered.

It seems that each unfolding crisis further erodes the confidence and belief in our existing institutions to solve our problems. Each crisis seems to slowly be waking us up to a realization of being somehow checkmated.

Feeling checkmated collectively is a sentiment I see increasing with each unfolding crisis.

I am curious about something. What force will this state of "checkmate" create going forward when we search the landscape for how change, reform or transition might happen??

Been posting at various sites and now started my own. Very apropos to the questions Gail is asking.

Questions we need to ask ourselves and go much much deeper. They barely skim the surface of what we are up against here.

A transition of and Era, the end of an age (of petroleum).

For a blinder ripping look at life as we know it and how we might transition from here to there, please visit my blog

http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com

Truth, ruthlessly spoken.

Big questions that beg for solutions? Here is a guy who is long on explaining the problem, short on explaining solutions:

The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

I suspect there are no solutions, only mitigation strategies. At least there are no solutions that most of us would want to volunteer for. I have been studying these sorts of things since 1975.

Question 1.

Regulation of businesses waxes and wanes and concerns a tremendous amount of of principles, laws, rules, conventions, agreements, constraints that are spelled out (or obvious), and so on. Just for flavor: intellectual property law, patents; salaries, taxes, tariffs, work safety, treatment of employees; transport and traffic rules; hygiene, pollution and other externalities; finance and accounting; best practices; obeying laws in many other areas.

Businesses never regulate themselves as they are in a larger environment that regulates (in the sense of influences, constrains, obliges) them.

The question should rather be, for enterprises that are involved in technologically complex and potentially devastating activities, what rules or regulations should be set up? Who is to decide? How are these decisions to be coded into regulations?

Next comes the question of conformity, compliance and control and enforcement by an outside agency.

Which is a whole other bag of beans. Plate of beans, sorry. What is clear, and made stark by the BP oil spill (and many other recent events) is that in a zeitgeist where competition in view of financial gain is tantamount, individuals and corporations will ‘cheat’ and ‘cut corners’ and use ‘blackmail’, ‘influence’, propaganda, etc. to come out with a better ‘score’ than competitors. They routinely ignore or underestimate 'risk' - to themselves and others - as the expectation of great rewards overrides probabilities and long-term viability, effects, etc.

The status of a business is principally judged only on the financial aspect - profits, stock price, dividends, investment for expansion (to rise even higher), competition on the price of goods, etc. There aren’t really any other criteria, except for the fuzzy and quasi religious and to my mind weird ‘the market will decide’ - e.g. to buy Barbies or rag dolls; caviar or cheap pickles; buy green or Wallmart; be blasted by speculators or not, etc.

The ‘decision’ rests with the end user/consumer/investor who shells out from his pocket book, usually garnished by one or the other business - from Goldman Sachs to BP to a Benetton franchise to a Mom and Pop store.

The focus on profit and growth at all costs prevents other dimensions from being treated in any serious way. As long as this is not acknowledged, it will not be possible to ‘regulate’ businesses in a half-way decent, or satisfactory fashion. The profit motive will win over compliance, even when regulation is very stiff.

And regulation costs the society a great deal of money in the shape of inefficient controls, as the controls fall into the sphere of non-profit activities, and are usually paid for by the tax payer, who most often would prefer to buy gas, or Barbies, or a flat screen, or shares in GS, etc.

The ultimate example is the prison: to control and constrain ppl’s behavior by force and regulations is incredibly expensive and cumbersome.

There are also questions of morality and responsibility pertinent here, but I am not addressing them directly. Simply said, one cannot, by decree, or law, or punitive measures, enforce human caring, human sympathy, more widely, the conservation of the commons, which must include non-human organisms and nature as a whole.

The question was about regulation and the locus of it, aka prescription and control, forced (or encouraged, suggested, etc.) compliance with or adherence to procedures and standards that are...

Communally elaborated? Decided by the industry itself? By politicians in view of gathering votes? By lobbyists who influence the democratic process? By super-technocrats who decide best practices and establish them in concrete? By following plain common sense and/or doing ’what is right’? Laid out, as general principles, in a Constitution?

These are the kinds of questions that require answers.....

Believing business will regulate itself is like believing the Mafia won't commit crimes if the police went away. Every business is looking for ways to reduce costs and if they believe they won't get caught breaking the rules then they will break the rules. When the GOP talks about limiting government they mean limiting the regulation of business if not by repealing the laws then by underfunding regulatory industries. Currently we don't have enough cops to enforce all the regulations on the books.

It is not a question of having the technologies to solve our problems it is a question of having the political will to implement those technologies. The technology to prevent the BP blowout exists and would have worked if used properly. Instead the was a 10 year old BOP with dead batteries. There is evidence of a poorly executed cementing job. There was some sort of gas leak on the platform due to bad plumbing. There was a much too cozy relationship with regulators at the MMS. There is the self contradictory missions of the MMS itself. Eliminate just one of those poorly executed jobs and the blowout would not have happened.
There is a rule that commercial vehicles must have retreaded tires on the front since a separated tread could mean the loss of steering and a deadly accident. That BOP was a retread and a very poor retread at that.

Tech solutions take time to be implemented and should have been started long ago. Market forces have not been there to make those changes and the political will still isn't there to have the government force those changes quickly enough.

Is the oil there? The record high prices of the last 5 years have had little impact on supply. Companies are going into untried areas of the world, mostly under water, to find the remaining oil.

Recent events have not changed my beliefs. They have only reinforced what I have believed all along.

As for income inequality the solution is for the Feds to make it possible for state and local governments to hire more teachers, police, health care providers, street repair crews, etc. This will open up jobs for the currently unemployed. There are still the long term unemployed which business is unlikely to hire. Businesses prefer to hire people who already work elsewhere over the guy who just cashed his last unemployment check. The government should hire and train these people and pay them a living wage. There is more than enough infrastructure out there that needs repair or replacement to keep these folks busy.

Recent events have shown us just how threatening fossil fuel use is to the general public as well as to these working in these industries. This blowout and the tailing pond dam failure show us how the public can be affected by industry mistakes. The opportunities at this time are mostly political and favor more government support for green energy technologies and efficiency improvements. The cost of the change over is dependent on the cost of fossil fuels to get the job done. This makes it cheaper to continue BAU even if a carbon tax is imposed. Anything that change the price of FF changes the price of alternatives and new more efficient vehicles, buildings, and devices. The government must bear this extra cost for a considerable time into the future.

1. Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

When you were a kid in school, could you and all the other kids generally be expected to do homework faithfully without parents lording it over you & establishing certain consequences were homework assignments to be become neglected? In my personal experience the answer would be no. Left to our own devices it would have been "Lord of the Flies" time, in no time at all.

2. Can technology solve our all our problems?

Technology is one of our problems, and the cure can never be the same as the disease. Technology is just primate tool use carried to the nth degree. Are we gonna stop being tool using primates? No. Could we stop even if we determined that it was indicated? I don't think so. We are technological beings for better or worse. We might think about learning moderation.

3. If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?

No, or at least not usually. Things take time. Sometimes not so much, other times you gotta wait. If some activity of yours could conceivably require a tech. solution double-quick, you'd better take steps to have one -or preferably several- tested and close at hand on the shelf. You don't wait for the fire to start before buying an extinguisher....then again if you're BP and the MMS, maybe you do.

4. Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is available?

Who knows? Depends what you mean by "depend" and who "everyone" is. I distrust the opinion of anybody or anything that has a commercial or political (those are the same thing most of the time) or religious interest in what my opinion is.

Questions

1. How have the recent events affected your beliefs?

My beliefs about what? Resource depletion? Not at all. Environmental risks & degradation? Not at all. Human shortsightedness? Not at all.

2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs...

Uuuuh, these are all toughies. Well, having spent decades trying to influence peoples' religious beliefs before I came to my senses and got out of that racket, I can tell you that gradually is the name of the game. Things people really believe as opposed to what they opine from time to time only change very slowly, if at all. I think that train has already left the station however and "gradually" is no longer on the table. We will all be overtaken by events before we have the luxury of gradually adjusting what we believe. I don't think the income inequality will be eliminated voluntarily, but I suspect it is inevitable that the extremes will go away through wealth destruction generally. There will always be some inequality of income. Done moderately it isn't a bad thing.

3. What opportunities do you see from the recent events?

I think there's gonna be some real deals on beach property in the Gulf. ;-)

We are good at explanations. The exponential nature of growth or the power of machines to undermine human beings since the beginning of the industrial revolution as recent examples on this thread.

Every community has a weakness where there is a taboo or something "politically incorrect" to bring to the table.

In this here Oil Drum community, which started as pioneers but may be reflecting as time passes a growing cross section of the greater society, there is probably a sacred assumption that would be a taboo to challenge and that is that education and analysis can wake people up or move transition forward.

Maybe it wont.

We spend globs and globs of brain cells dissecting our disintegrating society and yet all the truths revealed haven't resulted in much traction toward mitigation.

I predict this will continue to be the case because these discussions variably wind themselves down to a deeper collective awareness of being checkmated.

I think that is the dreaded undercurrent of unease and anxiety that is felt by society at large on a more intuitive level.

I don't want to suggest that there is a futility toward actions and solutions and that the demons of chaos that we have unleashed are the only arbitrators that we are forced to surrender to but I do see the failure of existing institutions
going forward further reinforcing a sense of "loss of control" rather than galvanizing us toward solutions and sacrifice to make it happen.

I think we underestimate what we already understand intuitively.

We are not capable to solve our problems any longer with the existing institutions and that solutions will no longer come from within.

Even my comments here are just one more facet, one more shovel full analytical shit to add to the ever growing pile.

Gail's question about beliefs gets at the most elemental of human rational processes. "Belief" begins when the infant learns to expect the arrival of the maternal breast in response to its hunger pangs and bleating cries. Knowledge is not more than a system of high confidence in particular beliefs.

I went through a paradigm shift in my belief system a couple of years ago when a new understanding of brain function dawned on me; I shook from head to toe for over an hour and, for the next week, every time I contemplated what I had grasped I would tremble. There may be people going through that sort of neurological adjustment of their beliefs due to the oil gush in the Gulf, but few of them would be among the people who follow this blog -- because folks here have already accommodated their expectations to catastrophic social events and many are seeking the breast of nurture elsewhere on mother earth than at the oil wells. Others here remain confident that their body of knowledge can continue to expand while their confreres are draining the earth's crust of its resources. How beneficent or harmful that expansion of technical knowledge can be to the human social project is implicit in Gail's question. However, both forms of accommodation may run counter to creative solutions to the present crisis. Please forgive a long post from a newbie as I introduce that paradigm shift in my thinking to you. I think it is relevant to the circular rational thinking that develops around a problem to be solved. Wisdom is prepared to re-examine beliefs, as Gail suggests. It also bears on several of the mistaken concepts of mental behaviour (e.g., what is "creative" about schizophrenia) that keep cropping up in this sector of cyberspace.

Following the Pressure Tutorial here is like a long listen to my adored dad. He was one of the designers of the world’s first atomic power plant at Chalk River, Ontario, Canada during WWII. He taught me before kindergarten age to read numbers with decimals correctly to “help him” proofread his second post-grad degree thesis. I learned much through his brilliant teaching, and more through his behaviour; for example, that when I as a teen came up with a solution to a technical problem in his laboratory he’d been telling me about for days he would not acknowledge (to me) my contribution, although the paper he later wrote on the solution would win him an industry award. I did not expect credit within his profession! Just honesty in our relationship and, maybe, bragging rights in my high school science class (although sworn secrecy would have been a thrill, too). Perhaps that is part of the reason I veered towards language and a fascination with human behaviour. Dad’s behaviour was inexplicably erratic in other ways. Not until after one of our sons was diagnosed as schizophrenic and I began to read a psychiatry text about schizophrenia did I recognize Dad’s patterns of behaviour as bipolarity. Dad had died the previous year.
Daniel’s behaviour was even more agonizing to deal with than my father’s had been. Ten years into Dan’s diagnosis I had applied the scientific method of trial and error to learn a few things that ran in the teeth of conventional medicine and that proved to my satisfaction psychiatrists didn’t know what they were talking about. For example, Dan recovered better from an episode of psychosis on a tiny fraction (1/96) of just one of the medications given to him in hospital. For another, I had noticed for years and had tested three times the two-minute intervals of better and lesser cognitive function that characterized Dan's mental function during psychotic episodes. Then, two years ago, imprisoned by winter conditions with Dan during a severe episode of his psychosis (on only minuscule medication)when Dan verbalized constantly from waking until sleeping - a circumstance a bit like the oil spew - I began to think maybe I was still smart enough to learn some neurology. Starting with the fact that Dan had been cured of his dyslexic syndrome just before his first psychotic break, I endeavoured to learn more about the theory of ear stimulation that had accomplished that “miracle.” The psychotic Dan had said a couple of times, “I’m dyslexic again.” I thought he meant the conditions were concurrent; now I realized he was saying that from his point of experience dyslexia and psychosis were the same. Long story short: I learned that a home-grown version of high-frequency music ear stimulation, i.e., an ordinary CD of violin music, combined with kindergarten-simple colouring of mandala patterns, cured Daniel’s classic symptoms of schizophrenia. It took 11 months. That "experiment" replicated similar healings of at least two of his previous episodes of psychosis where Dan had reached out for music on his own behalf.
By analyzing Daniel's language patterns (and other behaviour) during psychosis I was able to explain his schizophrenic neurology. Through my "library" research, conducted largely on the Internet and from basic texts (e.g., Grey's Anatomy) in Dad’s library (because I already live in the isolated country style the rest of ahe world may be returning to), I was able to describe the neurological paradigm that explains Daniel’s healings from both dyslexic syndrome and from schizophrenia (and the phases of bipolarity, etc. he traversed between those conditions). But my Eureka Moment led to more: the spectrum of human behaviours from the range of normal through the various forms of so-called “mental" illness — but that actually originate in the middle and inner ear (the “microchip”) — are determined by the level of integration of the hemispheres of the brain under the dominance of the left cerebral hemisphere (the “control panel”). That knowledge is my contribution to behavioural science and builds on the discoveries of the French otolaryngolgist Dr. Alfred Tomatis.

Some of the best metaphors (all language is metaphor) for describing the most powerful operation of the nervous system probably come not from the metalanguage of engineering ("microchip" and "control panel") but from the metalanguage of religion. Let's not forget that some of those fundamentalists with the terrifying political notions can heal a sick or injured body from a distance. I cannot (yet?) describe the physics of what happens when two or three are gathered together aligned to the Divine will, but it may be something like amplified sound. My prayer life had something to do with my ability to envision Daniel's healing; had a lot to do with introspection of my own mental processes; and allowed me to draw on models of extreme adherence to left-brain rationality and highly integrated thought processes at which Jesus seems to have excelled. (My father spent a lot of his spare time translating Biblical concepts into contemporary scientific terms for fellow Christians, for example, the consonances between the Big Bang and the opening verses of Genesis; he taught himself astronomy to provide the science for the Bethlehem Star.)

Dad liked to tell the story of the 10-year-old kid who came upon an accident where a semi was stuck under a bridge. The lad quickly solved the problem that had escaped the notice of all the emergency personnel, “Why don’t you let some of the air out of the truck’s tires?” We need that kind of thinking about the Gulf spew. Relative to the “expertise” of academic and medical people working on mental illness, I qualify as a 10-year-old kid. I had learned a thing or two about the scientific method a very long time ago from my father, but my persistence in seeking solutions for the behaviour problems in our family had as much to do with my beliefs. At the cutting edge of rational scientific seeking and of rational religious seeking is the notion of "belief." Building on one's knowledge and the personal testing of that knowledge is work on that frontier: the unknown/Unknown that one is seeking. Daniels' language, which altered in rationality between his two cognitive phases, demonstrated clearly that religious thought is left-brained and is one of the rational means of organizing perceived reality. Everyone who posts to this blog claims to be doing mental work on that frontier but using the metalanguage of their sphere of expertise. For the religious person and for the creative scientist/economist/name-your-expertise specialist seeking comes from a "mind set" or a particular state of cultivated consciousness. The states of consciousness of which the human brain is capable depend on the functional level of the ear as well as on the data (experience) that has been fed into the nervous system that condition its rational and non-rational capabilities. I was more "creative" than my vastly more knowledgable father, which is why I could better visualize the problem he was trying to solve. Today, I would say I had better continuing access BY my left rational brain TO my right holistic brain than he did. His bipolarity prevented consistent integration of his hemispheres. The sort of learning I applied to solving the riddle of our son’s mental illness was hardly more than the parsing of sentences I had learned in grade school, but I had the sort of access to my right brain that allowed me to "keep fluid" in applying that learning to a changing reality. [You may ask how well I did that when my puzzle-solving took a decade!]

When I found the answer, I could prove to a psychiatric specialist that schizophrenia is less what s/he calls "a disease of laterality" than a disease of non-laterality. Dan's hemisphere's traded dominance (to confound laterality) ever two minutes. However, my religious thinking underwent a Gestalt shift, too. Much that I had thought of as "spiritual" I had to recast as neurological (which to my thinking is no less Divine, cosmic, or God-oriented; the greater-than-I concept helps to keep the rational brain open to aspects of reality not yet understood). I drew on my academic language and my trained ability to provide the supportive research to persuade my target audience of facts that are right under their noses every day - and that have been under the collective human nose for ages. I also drew on my capacity to "vision" that gives the brain glimpses of future time, which I had learned in religious contexts. As I now understand the experience of "time" is based in the neurology of the ear, that understanding of "future" probably should be revised, too. (Perhaps Steven Hawking should take cognizance of that aspect of neurology, too, as he assesses time components of formulae.) Now, I am trying to produce simpler versions of my learning to communicate with the parents and children who most need it. In other words, to reach the educated minds for whom I wrote my book I have almost talked myself out of my own usefulness. Does that sound familiar?

May I propose that those contemplating the oil gush seek a paradigm shift like the one I had to make when I discovered something "new" that is fundamental to understanding brain function? I do not have an academic platform, a reputation, or a body of writing apart from my recently self-published book; if I had, I probably couldn’t have made my discoveries! You don't have to read it to judge my observations and arguments on their merits - I have saved you the trouble because my discoveries are here in a nutshell. However, I have shown that psychiatrists do not understand their subjects and that the neurologists with their MRIs and CT scans and PETs and so on are looking in the wrong place for the etiology of mental illness; their scientific papers run along the circular lines of the “informed” but pointless arguing of this blog where the thought swirls around what is already known like eddies in a whirlpool. Experts tend to become mired in their own beliefs about what they think they know. For example, the late Julian Jaynes, a psychologist, and the present Dr. Tim Crow, a noted psychiatrist, both have postulated that schizophrenia is a result of too great communication between the cerebral hemispheres, whereas I have shown that schizophrenic symptoms are the result of such drastically reduced inter-cerebral communication that the schizophrenic is operating much like a dual-brain patient in whom the corpus callosum (the great commisure joining the cerebral hemispheres) has been surgically severed. Mental illness — in fact, all of human behaviour — does not begin in the brain. It begins in the failure - or healthy function - of the smallest muscle in the body, the stapedius muscle, which is located in the middle ear. The ear regulates not only the voice (Tomatis's main claim to fame) but also the system of laterality (which he noticed) that includes left-hemispheric dominance and the efficient integration of the two hemispheres of the brain whose functions become specialized under that organization (my observation). (If anyone else has figured that out, it certainly has not filtered into psychiatric practice; see, for example, jimgottstein@psychrights.org.)

In many if not most cases (based on the clinical experience of Tomatis and Bérard), that right-ear stapedius muscle can be stimulated into normal flexibility through exposure to high frequency sound: violin music works. David’s harp worked sporadically on King Saul’s manic depression, but their political power differential removed Saul from his healing, which would have required a consistency of exposure to musical vibration. I venture to suggest that music (even from the piano) helped Oliver Sack's patients until he destroyed their middle ears with L-dopa. This knowledge has been available in our times since the mid-1950s in France when Dr. Alfred Tomatis did his seminal work, which Dr. Guy Bérard adapted. Their methods have been healing “mental” conditions and enhancing brain function for 60 years among people who know about them and can afford to access them through Tomatis Method and AIT listening centres (I am not associated with either of these businesses, but see, for example, www.thetomatismethod.com and www.georgianainstitute.org and www.drguyberard.com/). I have come up with a cheaper method and the theoretical neurological paradigm Tomatis overlooked while he was preoccupied with consulting psychiatrists. Many people have written about healings in their autistic children using sound stimulation and Bérard's slim book Hearing Equals Behavior includes the healing of suicidal depression among the healings that can be accomplished through sound stimulation. In other words, the solution to mental illness and to enhanced mental function is available but people have turned in the wrong direction for solutions when they have gone to the self-proclaimed experts for help (see, for example, Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic).
I don’t know enough about engineering, geology, and other areas of technical expertise as Dad did to propose the sane, staggeringly simple answer to the Gulf catastrophe. But someone among “the brightest and best” — or their children? — may know the geophysical and technological components of the Gulf situation as I have known behaviour, so that when 12 years ago I stumbled across the Tomatis Method for helping dyslexics I knew I had arrived at the explanation for most behaviour problems. The right kind of music used consistently can heal the ear and the brain, the body to some large extent, behaviour, and therefore relationships. This is relevant to addictions, learning disabilities, mental illness, and the enhanced performance of a normal brain. It is relevant to the investigations of all of the humanities. It is relevant to the social moralities expressed/discussed here.

The solution to the oil gush may be just as simple and within your grasp. Perhaps if those of you who are right-lateralized would tune into some violin concerti of Mozart or Bach or Vivaldi with headphones (the left speaker masked for maximum right-ear stimulation) for an hour or so for a few days you would reach a level of hemispheric integration that would allow you to envision that solution. I do not recommend that left-lateralized people or persons with so-called mental illnesses try this without expert support as, in Dan's words, the results may be "like brain surgery."
Thank you for listening.

1. My beliefs are the same. I've been freaked about no one talking about, much less preparing for the post oil age since about 2000, when I learned that the bell curve was 1995, ( and no I don't count shale and sour oil dregs as fattening up the curve away from diminishing returns. We are talking about a global economy that is dependent of fuel being cheaper to ship goods across oceans then local labor. What astounds is that the more we learn about the crude oil business, the closer to shore those big oil spills and inspection controversy - that people still aren't talking about preparing for the impending post oil age ?!

2. There have been some very good articles about steering our economy and beliefs towards small business — away from the global corporate monopolies that had eaten up competition enough for some to become bigger then many countries' economies. Income inequality has a lot to do with who owns and who loans. If we owned almost zero energy green homes, and businesses. If we had many safer miro-grids, better public transportation ( owned by the public ) then we would be both rebuilding our economy and preparing for the post oil age. Big oil/coal - with all their green advertising – really doesn't want this, because it shifts power and profit back to the people.

3. I see the oil spill in the gulf as a wake up call, a clear smudge in the lines of history that marks the tail end of the oil age. The opportunity is a possible green Renaissance using a combination of new technology, from new sensors and batteries, low energy computers etc.. a global communication network and local businesses using the new technology combined with old craft knowledge of the past, to make better durable goods, grow organic foods and make the cheap plastic economy we take for granted – history.

Resource Substitution

Several views of the near-term future of oil supply and demand suggest intolerable prices leading to severe demand destruction. In that event, what would be the role of resource substitution? Is it possible for technology to salvage industrial society, or would economic chaos destroy us?

One scenario comes from Glen Sweetnam of the US Department of Energy.
http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline...
In the event of insufficient investment in finding more liquid fuels, he says it’s possible that between 2011 and 2015 a significant energy gap could develop. This scenario shows an “energy gap” in world liquid fuels supply developing quickly after 2011, and the question is whether the “unidentified projects” will materialize to plug the gap.

Similarly, some recent forecasts from the financial sector are for much higher oil prices than at present. Merrill Lynch sees demand rising and supply inelastic, consistent with the resource peak and depletion model. They think that the spare capacity is only in OPEC and they forecast the price band widening from 70 to 85 dollars per barrel now to 50 to 150 dollars per barrel by 2014. Deutsche Bank expects a supply/demand crunch in 2016-17 causing a spike to $179 per barrel. Astonishingly, they expect the economic force of this squeeze will cause permanent demand destruction of oil and propel electrification of surface transport.

Under such circumstances, both economic theory and experience foretell that we must achieve resource substitution via new technology. I advocate that we should set about to make this to happen. That is, we must innovate our way out of potential trouble. The fine metaphor “the arrow of innovation” expresses the intense human urge to innovate. A confluence of many virtues contributes to the innovation process. It takes vision, intellect, leadership, risk, money, and hard work. We’ll need science, engineering, technology, investors, corporations, and wise government policies responsive to a new vision of the future.

For guidance on the substitution process, economist Robert Solow (1974) offered these challenging thoughts.
http://classes.engineering.wustl.edu/ese437/Solow_Resources.pdf
On the one hand, he said that if we can easily substitute other factors for natural resources then we can get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe. On the other, catastrophe is unavoidable if no substitute is found. Most interesting of all, he said that in between exhaustion and substitution are cases where the problem is real, interesting, and not foreclosed. So he’s advising us to look at the substitution process in a disciplined way. We need to puzzle out Solow’s uncertain outcomes and focus on the innovation process.

One innovator’s discipline for thinking about clean energy technology is laid out on Vinod Khosla’s website http://khoslaventures.com/khosla/default.html, which provides many idea papers and presentations. He suggests that promising technologies should have a number of attributes: truly renewable (i.e., renewables used sustainably) or inexhaustible, affordable, scalable, profitable, and not energy intensive. On careful examination, many options lack some of these qualities and thus are likely to have limited prospects. He also favors government policies that encourage and assist capitalists as prime actors to move the innovation agenda. This requires a transformational vision of the future among our political leadership and decision-makers. It also implies a risk-support role for government with private people and firms doing the actual work. Khosla says “What is amazing about this is the size of the markets. We are dealing with much harder science and technology, so we will see much higher rate of failure, but the wins will be bigger. More money will be made in cleantech than in traditional areas of Silicon Valley—by far.”

Another stimulating view is this blog by Joseph Romm: http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/06/breakthrough-technology-illusion-g...
Romm argues that we don’t have time (and don’t need) to wait for breakthrough technologies before transforming the energy system, because it normally takes decades from innovation to first commercialization and then 25 years for commercialization to reach scale. He thinks we will have to rely of existing technologies and take unusual policy steps to speed their deployment. Most importantly, he thinks they will suffice.

Finally, objections to the “technological fix” inevitably arise, to the effect that new technologies will just bring new problems. Well, of course. We’ll just have to address them. A literary allusion may be helpful in understanding this. Bruno Latour, in the February 2005 issue of the now-defunct Domus Magazine, made the point that in Mary Shelly’s 1817 novel, Victor Frankenstein’s real sin was not making the monster but rather his failure to manage it. At the end in the Alps, the creature complains to Frankenstein quite explicitly, “You have abandoned me, that’s why I have become evil.”

...makes one wonder about whether this deregulation really makes sense.

no wonder really...

depends on which side of the deregulations you were on....

if your lost your job... your benefits... your pension... your industry... your 401k... your savings... your healthcare... AND your housing value... (roughly in that order)... you might be more than "wondering"...

however...

if you were on the receiving end of this wealth transfer... you're "wondering"... what can we get our moneygrubbing hands on next...

see social security under attack... the last big motherload of taxpayer funds they're just peeing their pants to get their hands on...

george bush actually put his leg on this 'third rail' in 2005... billionaire pete peterson and tea party adoptee dick armey are working 24/7/365 to see this happen... (google it)...

check out the president's blue ribbon panel due to report on how to cut spending due out this december...

hey... feudalism and debt peonage isn't so bad... is it?

My two cents on Gail's Question #2:

One solution is: Promote frugality as a virtue.

You might read those words, knowing that global economic depression and hardship is the most likely outcome of our current situation, and think that this is a redundant statement and reality is going to take care of all that for you. But I didn’t write “necessity”; I wrote “virtue”.

Others might think it a platitude, but novelty is no measure of truth. Frugality is a virtue. Ben Franklin didn’t invent the concept; he merely passed it on. Frugality has been a refrain in the literary traditions of the world from Confucius to Robert Heinlein, and was preached as a virtue by writers from Cicero to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Frugality is both imminently functional (all that money, time and resources that frugal people save doesn’t just vanish into the void) and immediately practical. What’s more, it is not related to the peak oil debate.

It may seem odd to recommend a solution that can’t be tied back in to the Peak Oil debate while everyone on The Oil Drum is busy complaining that hardly any of the general public know what Peak Oil is, but consider: Hardly any of the general public know what Peak Oil is. When it hits the fan, folks won’t blame something that they don’t even know the name of. They’ll blame governments, oil companies, banks, or whatever else is handy. People have been over the Great Depression of the 20 th century with an archival fine toothed comb, and although historians have a pretty good handle on the initial events, no economist can explain its duration and severity to everyone’s satisfaction even today. (I have heard gardening blamed for the duration of the Great Depression. If that’s not a wild guess, I don’t know what is.)

Don’t get me wrong – no one worth knowing genuinely prefers to live in ignorance, and people have got to know. But it takes time to educate people, and people tend to spend their time on things they care about. We will never succeed in instilling the social behaviors needed in a post Peak Oil economy just by teaching people that Peak Oil exists. The average citizen won’t relate to Peak Oil until it’s a history lesson.

People can still relate to Frugality as a virtue, despite the best efforts of consumerist culture, so that’s what we can teach them the fastest. The virtue of a Virtue lies in its utility, and people need to be taught that they can use Frugality. People need to be reminded that being frugal is more than just saving for hard times. If you apply it right, you don’t need a loan to buy a car. If you apply it enough, you won’t need a mortgage to buy a house. Thrift is the fastest way to conserve resources. Being independently wealthy doesn’t require you to also be a millionaire, and a lot of people can get there sooner than they think – if they would just be frugal.

Of course, the fact that this would also reduce people’s environmental impact and decrease their dependence on resources likely to be constrained in a post Peak Oil economy is just a fortuitous accident.

First-time poster, have been reading for the past month or so and want to start with a thank you for all the great information I've gotten here that I could never have gotten any other way. Have been planning to donate, and did today.

Did not plan on commenting, I don't have any brilliant ideas for capping the well, I'm a software engineer and don't have a clue what it would take to stop this thing. But I do feel qualified to comment on political issues and wanted to say a couple of things here in regard to regulation.

Politics is a cesspool and DC is the worst of the worst. If you honestly believe the Federal Government has your best interests at heart, you haven't been paying attention. Everything the Federal Government touches turns to gold for the politicians and their friends and *crap* for the rest of us. We need *LESS* government interference, not more.

For those of you who believe that government is the solution to our problems, I urge you to read a couple of books. The first is "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek. The second is "Attention Deficit Democracy" by James Bovard. There are many others as well, those two are both well-written and easy to read.

The 20th century has been called the golden age of central government. Take a good look at how that century fared in the final tally, several hundred million innocent people dead directly at the hands of governments and millions upon millions more in desperate poverty because of central planning.

When it comes to representing the best interests and well-being of the citizens, government is a miserable failure. Every time I hear a politician tell me he's going to "protect" me, I reach back and check for my wallet to make sure it's still there. Giving them more power will be like pouring gasoline on an already-raging fire. Government is morally and intellectually bankrupt, it is NOT the solution to this problem or any other. Please, everyone, think carefully before you call for handing more power to Washington DC. They already have entirely too much.

Let's see... how to save ourselves...

Do I have to stick to the bullet points?

The term, "the government" really means the corporate oligarchy. That's not hyperbole, or a cliche; it is reality.

As long as that reality remains, then we are only along for the ride. To understand the nature of the ride, just look at some of the scenery we have passed:

• A massive and sustained propaganda campaign using a media unwilling to question facts lied at every turn to sell the idea of war in Iraq. We knowingly went in understrength to maximize the use of private contractors in the supplementally funded war. The plan to hire local Iraqis for reconstruction was scrapped as being anti-competitive. The result was a surge in cheap foreign workers streaming into a nation with 65% unemployment, and the results were predictable. Nearly all reconstruction funds were depleted by security costs, and this provided the out needed to receive payment on cost-plus contracts that were never completed.
• Retroactive immunity was granted to the telcom industry for their participation in wholesale illegal spying on American citizens. Members of congress voted with blank expressions even as their offices were inundated with unprecedented numbers of calls telling them not to do it.
• Even after General Petraeus admitted Al Quaida was not in Afghanistan, the US escalated our war there. A war that is now seeing DEA agents alongside US troops doing drug interdiction. No self-respecting general would ever field an army overseas to run drug interdiction. It is a very clear sign that something is horribly amiss.
• Congress was purportedly to have been briefed by Treasurer Hank Paulson behind closed doors, that unless they gave him $2 trillion, martial law would be declared in America. Congress, and armies of lobbyists spend all year fighting to divide the pie, but a poorly written two-page letter by Paulson earned him more money than our bloated military budget. The money was not even used as it was described in the letter. One of his first acts was to hand an average of $20 billion to each large bank during a meeting in which no minutes were kept.
• Health care. It's killing us.

The corporatist oligarchy simply does not use the same calculus that would be used to better society. Despite what the conservative bench claims, corporations are not people - they are aliens who must always grow larger, or die off. It's not evil, it's alien, and their needs can only be filled by feeding off the public. They are parasites and they have invaded out body politic, our justice system, and are now trying for a Unitary Executive.

So, yeah... peak oil is a problem, but solving it really isn't up to us. We have a different problem to solve first.

First Questions:
1. Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?
Or, do people need to be controlled? It all depends on what your expectations are about other people. Humans survived as a species for millions of years with no formal set of written laws.

2. Can technology solve our all our problems?
Yes, it can. And it can create all of our problems as well.

3. If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?
Yes. Here is an immediately available technological solution which addresses nearly EVERY problem we face regarding peak oil, climate change, and resource depletion:
http://academicearth.org/courses/death

4. Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is available?
There was a time when The Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded and outnumbered by Indians (they weren't called Native Americans back then). The Lone Ranger said, "Can we really expect to get out of here alive, Tonto?"

Tonto replied, "What you mean 'we', paleface?"

The point being that maybe who you think "we" is isn't "we".

Second Questions:
1. How have the recent events affected your beliefs?
I am having a lot more fun than I used to, and I waste less energy on hatred and butthurt. My motto is this: Don't get mad, get a bucket of popcorn and watch them fail.

2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs toward some more helpful belief systems?
Yes. "The Brain That Changes Itself", by Dr. Norman Doidge. "Mastery", by George Leonard.

3. What opportunities do you see from the recent events?
Just about all the ones I saw before recent events.

There are no easy answers but I made some videos showing how people can prepare for Peak Oil to mitigate the negative effects that are coming...the first one is attached here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHmXhgBhtWk

MrEnergyCzar

I believe this is the most important question:

2. Can technology solve our all our problems?

My answer: No. Some of our problems are innate in human nature as produced by natural selection. We've got instincts to breed and consume that will end up putting us back up against Malthusian limits sooner or later. Robin Hanson points out that our descendants will run up against the limit of the number of atoms in the galaxy.

The only way technology could solve all of our problems would be if we used genetic technology to reengineer human nature to put dampers on our desires to consume and reproduce. But I'm skeptical that will ever happen.

In the short run (the next 20 years) I expect Peak Oil will cause a world economic depression. We'll still have an industrialized civilization in the more developed countries. But living standards will go down substantially.

1. How have the recent events affected my beliefs?

I had to re-evaluate my long standing position on limited regulations. In principle, I believe that people should have the right to do whatever they want provided in doing so, they don't interfer with other people's right to do the same. This does not mean that a person can yell fire in a crowed theater because in doing so, they invoke the response of the fire department to a useless cause which thereby increases the risk of damages to others in the comunity should an actual fire event take place.

After listening to people complain about this accident being a result of not enough regulations, I decided to browse through Title 30 subparts 200-299 MMS section. I found out that the MMS regulations are quite onerous, requiring plans,conduct of operations and quality assurance hold points for verification. That they are somewhat similar to the nuclear regulations and plenty. All good if you consider that the government is responsible for protecting peoples rights to a clean environment which are placed in danger due to the amount of risk created by drilling in the deep. I have learned that this is a risky business. The government request that all drilling plans be based on a Probabilistic Risk Assessment and an Environmental Impact Report. This requires a plan that must be followed. It's an agreement that ensures to the government that such risks will be limited and any events (Well Kick) will be mitigated by effective components such as the BOP.

After reading the article on this site about What Caused the Deep Water Horizon Accident, it became clear to me that short cuts were made and that their may have been a lax in the safety culture by BP. There may also have been some incompetence on the part of the MMS who may have approved changes to the drilling plan. Last year I heard Congress challenging the oil industry to use it or lose it, and during such time the economy was and is on a downward spiral. It seems we love to step on the neck of the oil industry but also love the oil that they produce. We need to stop the love hate relationship with oil and deal with it for what it is and that is a bunch of hard working professionals risking their lives for profit to get the oil that we ordered to the market. After we understand this, then we can agree to address the root cause of our demand for oil.

Do we need more regulations? Maybe but first we need to find the root cause of this disaster and then go back and find out how it can be prevented.

2. Are there ways we can gradually shift beliefs toward some more helpful belief systems? Income Inequality?
I think if you consider income inequality then you have to include entitlements and taxes. Let's just cut through the economics of income inequality and offset the income tax with a 5 dollar a gallon tax on gasoline.