nothing is wrong with conservation - the fallacy that a lot of people seem to get into is that the opposite of "Al Gore's movie was idiotic" is not "we should keep polluting a lot".

Pollution, oil dependence, etc, are all bad for a variety of reasons, regardless of the state of Global Warming.

The Marshall plan was entirely in self-interest. Here's historian Howard Zinn on the Marshall Plan:

The motives for the Marshall Plan were both economic and political. Just to point to one aspect of the economic motive: George Marshall was quoted in an early 1948 State Department bulletin: "It is idle to think that a Europe left to its own efforts...would remain open to American business in the same way that we have known it in the past." Most of the money went to American businesses exporting to Europe. At least 10% of the aid money went for European purchases of oil, moving them away from coal-dependency (which involved dealing with troublesome trade unions) to oil dependency, with the U.S. dominant in the world oil market. The political motive was to shore up anti-Communist governments in France and Italy. Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson said at the time: "These measures of relief and reconstruction have been only n part suggested by humanitarianism. Your Congress has authorized and your Government is carrying out, a policy of relief and reconstruction today chiefly as a matter of national self-interest". You can read much more about the Marshall Plan, that is, realistic evaluations, in Michael Hogan's book "The Marshall Plan" (Cambridge Univ. Press 1987) and in Melvyn Leffler's excellent book "A Preponderance ofPower" (Stanford Univ. Press, 1992)

The Apollo Program was indeed a large project of the cold war - and it was arguably also a massive waste of money that was greatly needed elsewhere. I should have made it clear that by "great" I mean great in both the ethical sense as well as scale.

US history is like a clogged toilet; the more you flush the shit keeps rising.

The high price of gas is a natural reaction of the worldwide energy market. Demand is increasing yet supplies are basically still the same below ground, instability has increased and not decreased.

Of course most of those price fluctuations are speculative, Big oil profits actually increased not decreased. Because it's being played on the market, while external factors affecting the oil supply did increase, the supply actually has been expanding in terms of extraction and prospecting, so the oil companies are basically making a killing under the guise of supply instability and price fluctuations. The oil companies of course increase the prices on what is most suitable for their profits, the fact that high energy costs actually stagnant the economy in the long run. The only way that will change is if the self-interest of the American people as a whole and not as individuals or as corporations start to decide on what is best for the country.

America finds itself in the strange position of having to wane off oil dependence while at the same time still relying on world trade oil in US dollars to fund it's gigantic debt.

Loans in the gulf are loans in the gulf, when I worked in Kuwait, we would receive daily faxes of central bank cleared clients who could apply for a loan, this would be put in a large paper binder. One would literally spend 40 to 50 minutes going through this gigantic list to find the loan applicants file. In short the system was hardly modernized for speed or accuracy clearly. There was no centralized network system between the banks and the central bank. Then furthermore you factor in wasta, familial relations and such it's not surprising that many loans went into doomed ideas.

These regulations and modernization has to be stepped up definitely if real growth is to take place, inshallah we will see it come within the next 5 to 10 years.

But more so then that there needs to be a loosening of the stringent markets that currently exist in many of the Middle Eastern countries that have large oil reserves, they require a silent partner from the country to participate in any business scheme. This is of course unattractive for any foreign direct investor because instantly there needs to be a middle man working between the firm and the goverment to get commercial registration. This is a form of market protectionism, it also leads to bad managerial conflicts as the silent partner could pull the plug on the business by demanding more then his fair share of profits.

There has been progress towards this with the development of Free Trade Zones however the greater domestic market is still monopolized by co-ops and other larger retailers. Goods for these is controlled by a few key suppliers.

Furthermore there needs to be greater investment in infrastructure. Specifically telecommunications. Which is just poor in many of the Gulf States.

The basic problem for all the middle east nations is how to remove themselves from oil dependency, and develop and foster a economy based on trade between East and West. Dubai has been trying to do everything at once and in some ways I think it has been poorly managed, alot of the projects put in place are vanity projects hoping to see a large influx of tourism. This of course would not happen until the middle east is politically stable enough for more then just the European and Asian markets to visit. However they have successfully been reducing their oil dependency, and most of their GDP is now non-fossil fuel based, so we will see how it progresses.

I also think that the vid takes on too big of a scope...tackles global warming, oil dependence, the economy, renewable energy, all in 13 minutes. Not too sure about how they were hoping to pull that off.

After reading the comments here, I just had to register to post my own opinion. I think this video is a perfect example of the simplistic thinking and cherry picking of information that will continue to haunt the forward thinking, even with the wealth of opinion and fact that the internet provides.

"Too much like right" is a very appropriate way to describe BB's demonstration. It's agressively simplistic in its framing: throw money at the problem and it's taken care of. It's just ludicrous to say that if you spend $10 billion more on energy research that it WILL cut our oil dependency in half. Likewise, if we throw $25 billion more at world hunger, then all the children will be fed. I wonder if BB remember Somalia and how well throwing money, food, and even enforcement worked over there. Aid can be effective, but it isn't as simple as stacking a couple of oreos.

With that said, our defense spending may be overboard if a true assesment of the threat to our national security could be had. I'd say the nature of government spending, especially defense spending, is to go too far and misappropriate and waste. However, the U.S. has not had any major terrorist events on home soil since 911. Perhaps our spending is a part of this accomplishment, who knows. Not I, nor Ben and Jerry.