Mark Nixon

Other Opinions Mark Nixon “If we don’t drill more, in this country, I am quite concerned about civil disturbances in our urban areas because of the price of fuel” says John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil.
His solution, of course, is to ask our legislators to relax drilling restrictions in areas like ANWR (the Arctic refuge in Alaska) and off our coasts. Events which will send the signal that everything is back to normal and we can safely resume our excessive (patriotic?) consumption habits. And when we finally do run out of oil, in the distant future, robust American market forces will fix this temporary problem with Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the marketplace.
Price, profit incentive, and technology are all we need to correct any imbalance between supply and demand, say the oil companies. In contrast, author Richard Heinberg (“The Party’s Over,“ “Peak Everything:) takes a different and longer view: “Cheap oil is the party we’ve been enjoying for the past 150 years, and that party is coming to an end, in our lifetime. We’re going to see the end of the age of oil, and the result of that will be the end of the American way of life.”

Features Mark Nixon When Rick Ingersoll moved to Traverse City in 1974, he swears “I never sat through a full cycle at any traffic light in town.“ The sleepy resort community he and his family discovered was the great, good place they hoped would never change. But, of course, change it did, and the change that most annoyed Rick on his commute to and from work was the steadily increasing auto congestion. To his recollection, the breaking point corresponded roughly to the national attention brought on by Traverse City‘s hosting of the National Governors Conference.