Uh huh. What measures? The senate doesn’t set gasoline prices. It could tax gas more, or less, but taxes have not been the driver of gas prices.

“The problem with high prices is that they might come down, will probably come down.”

The world market sets the price, and the price is rising because there is scarcity and the utility of oil is so great that people will likely keep paying more for it. It’s a rare expert that thinks they’ve hit their high.

“I’m happy when the oil companies make huge profits. That means that there’s some part of it that OPEC isn’t getting.”

You are being inscrutable.

“People are afraid to invest in alternative energy … unless they can count on prices remaining high.”

Partially that might be true. It is major issue of contention, actually, and the reasons as to why alternative energy has not been widely deployed have probably shifted in recent years as technology has only recently greatly improved. But mainly, utilities don’t invest in alternative energy, in a very large way, because it has been cheaper to burn coal and oil to create electricity, even now despite improvement in technology and rising prices, and this will continue for some time into the future. I think there are very few utilities that have been fearful of investing in renewable energy because they thought that coal and oil were NOT going to rise in price. They continue to not invest in renewables, today, for reasons of price competiveness, uncertainty in the cost of C02 emissions, and purely practical reasons of the technology and expertise in renewables not being sufficient enough. To invest in renewables, utilities will need to know, most importantly, what rules there will be for emitting carbon, what sort of plan there will be for improvement in the electricity grid, and what sort of subsidy regime, if any, there will be, and that there will be enough engineers and workers and mature technology to make it possible.

Joe Romm argues strongly that right now, unlike the past, some low carbon energy technology is at the level in price and maturity it needs to be to be successfully deployed. And that it is necessary to deploy it now, because the cost of not doing so will be too great. Others argue that renewables are not ready.

“People are afraid to invest in fuel efficient vehicles.”

Toyota and Honda are making money selling small cars, and have unfearfully been investing in hybrid and small fuel-efficient engines for decades now, while the domestic automakers have slowly death-spiraled. This is more a case of badly run companies refusing to do what was best for themselves for decades on end, not a case of consumers making bad choices.

Shame on Boehner for going on vacation too then!