Sylvia, I borrowed this from CommonDreams.org
Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?
by Robert Freeman.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a stake and place it in a clearing.

Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it is. It can just barely get its hand into the coconut but, stuffed with booty, it cannot pull the hand back out. The Indians easily walk up to the monkey and capture it. Even as the Indians approach, the monkey screams in horror, not only in fear of its captors, but equally as much, one imagines, in recognition of the tragedy of its own lethal but still unalterable greed.

Pirsig uses the story to illustrate the problem of value rigidity. The monkey cannot properly evaluate the relative worth of a handful of food compared to its life. It chooses wrongly, catastrophically so, dooming itself by its own short-term fixation on a relatively paltry pleasure.

America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face (whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean ourselves off of oil—to quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilization—or to continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force.

Airme, well put. Is oil worth fighting for? Just ask the three wise monkeys. Howard saw no corruption by his government in oil for food. He doesn't talk about oil except to deny its relevance for us being there, and will not hear of Brendon Nelson talk about oil although that news story was put out on Al Jaziera News, the same day.

Meanwhile, Iraqi motorists must queue for hours petrol, just like the Iranians.

Oil continues to be stolen and smuggled.

Oil facilities keep being attacked, since denial of oil to the US, is seen by insurgents as a way of cheating the Texan oilman come president, the spoils of his invasion.

It's no wonder, oil has been called the Devil's curse.

Instead of spending hundreds of millions on the Iraq war effort, trying to secure an elusive share of Iraq's dwindling highly sought after future oil production, wouldn't a better investment be to promote conversion to hydrogen and electric car production?

Part 1
"Instead of spending hundreds of millions on the Iraq war effort, trying to secure an elusive share of Iraq's dwindling highly sought after future oil production, wouldn't a better investment be to promote conversion to hydrogen and electric car production?"

Fair Go, I agree with your question in principle, but only to the degree of shifting monies for the war effort into other sources of energy. Forget hydrogen. It will never be practical. The reason it will never be a useful form of energy is explained on dozens of peak oil sites. Simply put, it's an energy carrier, not an energy source.

As for electric cars, one of the first things people must realise (no matter how painful the thought may be), is that humans cannot continue to own self transportation units (cars) to the degree that is currently possible. For one thing, the amount of platinum, copper, lead, etc required to convert our current fleet of cars, not to mention trucks, motorcycles, speedboats, etc, over to an electrically driven power source far exceeds the availability of the precious resources required. This also applies to the huge amounts of coal or gas used to manufacture EV's. Few truly understand the enormity of such an undertaking. Also, we most likely no longer have time to make the transition from an oil based economy to an alternative.

Part 2
Cars have become an expected birth right for young people in advanced societies and yet they've only been with us for just over 100 years. They've been largely responsible for much of the depletion of natural resources. Oh yes! They've been instrumental in propping up our expanding economy, but at the same time, our expectation of the right to drive ourselves around verses the privilege of getting from point A to B will certainly be mankind's undoing if the rush for car ownership is not curtailed.

Somehow, we must cause the general world wide population to realise that these fossil burning monstrosities are more about convenience than practicality. What we badly need are Government heads who are willing to speak openly about the impending oil crises and actively do something about it. More rail services to outlying suburbs would be a great start.
Maybe Michael of Adelaide can help me out here.

Teddles,

The sinking of the Lusitania (like Pearl Harbour) has always been a suspected "false-flag" operation designed to gain entry into the war, despite contrary public opinion.
The start of that war owes as much to the construction of the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway as the assassination of an Archduke.
It was Rockefeller and Standard Oil who wanted to get the USA into WW1 because it was known as the world moved increasingly from coal to oil power that Texas would not be able to provide enough oil of the USA for the rest of the century.

According to Winston Churchill, this late entry of the USA into WW1 extended that war for a year longer than it would have lasted and ultimately led to the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism and ultimately to Naziism, so the world really owes them a lot.

As for the Japanese, they went to war primarily to sieze the oil and gas reserves in South-East Asia because the USA had blockaded their supplies to provoke the Pearl Harbour attack.

According to the chief historian of the Canberra War Memorial, the allies knew in 1942 that Australia was never a target for invasion.
This information was deliberately supressed from the public for obvious reasons at the time but was never corrected after the war, so the myth lives on. What were we actually saved from?

Later, it was the Americans who helped put Saddam into power in Iraq to safeguard primarily British Oil interests and to fight the Iranians on their behalf.
Likewise, their support for the Shah led to the rise of a sectarian Islamic state in Iran. (Persia earlier hoped to attract the help of the Nazis to kick out the Allies by changing it's name to Iran ("Aryan"))

(Continued)

The so-called "War on Terror" is a farce and can never be won. The Central Bank of America is a private company and profits directly from war. The longer it lasts, the more money they will make. This is not an opinion - it is a fact.

This is one of the reasons the Vietnam War was lost. Their army was hamstrung by policies that prevented them from winning.

Every President for the last 40 years has been an "oil man" or has come from an oil State (except Carter who effectively halted the growth of the nuclear industry on their behalf) so you can see where a lot of political influence comes from.

GWB is a only stooge for these interested parties. What other explanation could there be for his rise to power? The last US President who stood up to these other interests was JFK and we know what happened to him.

Are Australians always destined to be cannon-fodder for the military and financial interests of other countries?

Should we be sending our young people to die for the sake of a signing a Free-Trade Agreement or to clean up the messes created by other people?