.......... than right.

Yes, Germany has invest heavily in renewables. At huge cost however. As the author points out Germany's investment in renewable sources of energy has been very expensive. They are hoping to recoup this when renewables increase in demand. In the meanwhile, though, it's the German citizenry that absorb the higher costs. I lived in Germany 16 years, just left last year to move to Thailand. Tax rates are brutal, and Germany foolishly went down the road of decommissioning their nuclear power plants. The result? Germany is now building the largest coal fueled power plant in the world (by a good margin) and it does not have the capacity to sink the CO2 produced.

The US military budget is very large, but the author ignores the fact that the US economy is very large and that the US has global military commitments (which is the heart of the issue the author ignores but which is the true agenda in the paragraph). The pacman eating the US budget isn't the military, but rather medicare. That's eating us alive.

Furthermore, numbers can be twisted anyway you want. For example:

"The United States spends 3.7% of its GDP on its military, more than France's 2.6% and less than Saudi Arabia's 10%.[9] This is historically low for the United States since it peaked in 1944 at 37.8% of GDP (it reached the lowest point of 3.0% in 1999-2001)."

The US is at war, France is not.

Victory in Pattani

I'd hate for them to double it to $8 a gallon.  For me to be able to afford that $8 gas, they'd have to stop spending my social security and federal income taxes on a war I didn't need and didn't ask for.  In fact, if you average in the cost of smart bombs, cruise missiles, and an aircraft carrier group sitting in the Persian Gulf 365 days a year (and a trillion dollar war in the oil fields), I'm probably already paying $10 a gallon.  So I'm not any better off than the Europeans.  They just pay higher energy costs rather than paying for a war to have lower energy costs.  

How much money/blood has Germany spent in Iraq the past 5 years?  Ok...so how much are they actually paying per KW of electricity then?

Shu pas a vende.

Those guys all bought the analyst BS.  Their whole peak oil frenzy depends upon soaring oil prices.

It's hedge funds again, like the mortgage crisis.

Re-regulation is needed, period.

The anti-gas guzzling eco frenzy likewise depends upon this gas price being a real supply crisis.  they believe what they want, right andf left.  the truth is that speculation has doubled the price of oil.

And is doing the same to everything else, food, electricity, coal...

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

in my house, oil price explanations are a drinking game. every time someone offers a new reason you have to do a shot. a US petrodollar conspiracy to "manage" foreign debt and force north american alternative fossil fuels into profitability -- that one almost finished me -- but i was saved by multiple rounds of "increased demand."

it will be very hard for us to answer the many questions about why guzzling gas went south in 2007. the combination of market pressure on oil price, housing-burst-escapee pressure on oil price, consumer debt implosion, housing-starts-drop-driven drop in pickup truck purchases, guzzler-depreciation knock-on effects, health-housing-education-tax inflation... wait where was i....

OK, I should make a more rational argument...Oh-kay! sheesh!

Here's my main argument -- overshoot is the flip side of global warming/pollution.  Overshoot occurs when an ecosystem is overused, or is used up.  Pollution is what happens when an ecosystem is overloaded with certain elements.  They both happen when some part of the ecosystem, generally of an organic source, that gets out of control.

Overshoot translates into massive ecosystem destruction, as in forests and fisheries.  Peak oil and the agricultural problems are examples of overshoot.  In the case of agriculture, water and soil have been destroyed, destroying the very basis of agriculture, in other words, the capital on which the production of food is based is being destroyed.

Peak oil is more difficult to explain, evidently, unless as I said you study the arguments made on sites such as theoildrum.com.  But the thing you should realize is that there have always been "problems" in oil supply, such as temporary bottlenecks, speculation, manipulation, etc. etc., what's different now is that nobody can turn on the spigot, which in the past was used to wash away all problems.  In other words, every time there was a supply problem, the US or Saudi Arabia or somebody could pump more oil.

They want to pump more oil, not less, because they (such as Saudi Arabia) realize that people will move away from oil if it becomes clear that oil will be expensive, forever.  Why is oil soaring now?  All of a sudden speculators and oil countries/companies have figured out how to manipulate the market?  No, a much simpler explanation is that, like every other resource on this planet, oil is finite.  The amounts of oil being used every day are unbelievable -- 82 million barrels per day.  Just think about that -- only don't because I don't even know how to conceptualize it.

So problems with oil, fertilizer, food, etc. are perfectly understandable from an ecological perspective, as Catton pointed out over 20 years ago in his book, "Overshoot".  There's that word again, and whatever else humans are doing to manipulate the market, you should think carefully about how the global economy is working as an ecosystem.