I just read an interesting talk by Larry Wilkerson at the New America Foundation on the current administration and why our government is in such a mess. The JP doesn't endorse everything he says or recommends, but as a former chief of staff of the State Department under Colin Powell, he brings an insider's view of what is and what isn't, as well as what ought to be done. The link came from Billmon, who comments extensively. An example of Wilkerson's presentation:

The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption and, as one little girl said yesterday at the Yoshiyama Awards, do you know that we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources? We do; we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources. Well, we have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets. We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly. That’s how serious[ly] we thought about it.

What he didn't say was that even if we conquered and exploited all that mideast oil, we would only put off the scarcity a few years. As I keep writing over and over, the oil industry hasn't discovered any major oil fields since the '60s and, given the improvement in prospecting technology, there's good reason to believe that there aren't any more North Sea, Prudhoe Bay, or Ghawar fields to be discovered. Since the world is using 4-5 barrels of oil for every barrel discovered, the arithmetic is elementary that this rate of usage will not continue indefinitely, much less grow. The conclusion: things are going to get really tough before long.