Some of the people on this board must be communists.
Why do you believe in central planning? You seem to have faith that the government can predict oil prices and knows when to “invest” in alternative energy. Why should the government or anyone else have invested in alternative energy back in 1998 when oil was $10-12 per barrel? That’s the lowest price since the Great Depression.
The whole of the Soviet Union was about central planning and the place, despite having a wealth of natural resources, went bankrupt.
No one planned the cities and suburbs 50 or more years ago around the “end of cheap oil”! All they wanted to do was build houses for returning GI’s at prices ordinary people could afford. They weren’t worried that oil was going to run out in 100 years! This was a time when they had fantasies about nuclear powered cars and electricity that was “too cheap to meter” and other nonsense.
In 1968 Stanley Kubrik made the film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” that showed an optimistic picture of a possible future. Men were going to go to the moon in the next year. It was only a natural extension of the current trends then to postulate moon bases in 2001.
Instead of that future imagined in 1968, the year 2001 gave us 9/11.
