A) You can use Natural Gas for pretty much everything oil is used for energy related wise.

Now Plastics would get expensive as hell, but that's a different story.

B) Yeah, i'd like to think in 40 years or so renewable energy should be viable.  I mean, it is 30 years-40 after all. 

Aside from which, we're already building up our coal and natural gas resources.

Though really, lets pretend they don't... you think if an Oil Company wants to make more infrastructure for Oil or Natural Gas or Coal, that they're going to pay market prices for Oil?

Or am I just going to charge myself "at cost" for my own products?  It's not like these products are being produced at "Full power" either... meaning that as supply gets low, they would just pull out excess supply to build replacements... because companies aren't stupid.

I mean, how do you think new Oil riggs and natural gas mining gets set up constantly as it is?

Those don't require energy?

A.) How many planes, boats, rail cars, road vehicles, chainsaws, diggers etc can you power directly from either natural gas or coal?

B.) How do you build up finite resource that you're depleting? Answer: You don't. You can find more, you can expend ever increasing effort to extract more but you don't magically create the stuff. Anyway hopefully in 40 years time doesn't cut it because depletion is already cutting the supply of conventional oil. Why else do you think Shell is drilling in the Arctic? If they had any better prospects anywhere else in the world don't you think they'd try to drill those first? Why, pray tell do you think that the capital expenditure for companies like ExonMobil are increasing and yet the relative share of oil production remains flat? Why do you think that drilling activity in the U.S.A. recently fell from an all time high and yet production is only half of that in the 1970s?

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical_oil_prices_chart.asp

We simply cannot get oil out of the ground fast enough and cheaply enough to satisfy demand which is why the price is so high. Natural gas is no substitute, nor is coal. You can exchange coal for natural gas for most things and anywhere where the utility of the energy suplied is less valuable than sheer BTUs you already the substitution has already happened, the areas where it hasn't happened, haven't because they either can't or it is extremely impractical.

That's just not true.  It would be very practical to implement natural gas in cars for example... and pretty cheap.

Oil is in fine condition still, you can tell by the fact that we still aren't tapping into COUNTLESS areas with oil that have been named "off limits".

Hell, offshore drilling was just recently brought back on the table in part of Obama's plan to "Outflank the Republicans" by suddenly getting way more conservative.  Like his extremely harsh actions recently against legal (state wise) Marijuana dealers.

Jesus...

Countless areas?

Off Limits?

Methinks you're just blowing smoke up my arse. All I see is wishful thinking, cornucopianism and ignorance. You simply don't know enough about any of these topics to be worth talking to about these topics.

There is something like 500 billion barrels of Oil in the Brakken Shale formation.  Is all of it recoverable?  No, but the US used about 6.25 billion barrels of oil a day.

This is just one area in the US.

Although I don't buy the actual math or estimates... this gives some pretty good fundamentals about all the untapped oil just in the US.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/256403-how-much-oil-does-the-u-s-have-in-the-ground-what-does-it-mean-for-investors

Also, it isn't supply that's raising prices... it's demand.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833104577072301052759854.html

...

How exactly do you replace oil from say Gahwar or any other conventional super massive - large conventional oil field which are still producing to this day with oil from fractured shale which depletes at a rate of 90% in the first year and 8% thereafter? How do you replace oil which is produced for a few dollars per barrel with oil which is only economical at prices above $60 per barrel? Facing reality here the majority of the oil in that formation will likely never be recoverable even at prices above $150 U.S.D. a barrel.

http://s1095.photobucket.com/albums/i475/westexas/?action=view¤t=Slide1-18.jpg

You say demand is the cause and yet why has supply not increased when oil reached historical highs adjusted for inflation? Why isn't it flowing any faster out of the ground with prices in real terms doubling and trebbling in the space of 10 years?

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical_oil_prices_chart.asp

If you cannot bring yourself to say 'supply problem' then I may as well think of you as a ... and leave it at that.

The reason why socialised health care is cheaper is that you have a monopsony (single buyer) of health care. If you want to practice in a socialised system you effectively need to sell your service to the government and as a monopsony it has the ability to pay less than what the market price may have otherwise been. On the other hand if you have large private companies with an imperitive to increase profits year after year, they'll have an incentive to not only charge more but also try to influence regulation in their favour as well.

Depends on what kind of regulations the monosopy can force onto the providers. In the US, Medicare is a partial monsopy. They pay for a significant part of US health care. Because of that, they've driven up, not driven down, costs because everything is tied to what they are willing to pay out. Its created gross inefficiencies as some providers peg their prices to whatever the government will pay, which distorts the true price of health care.

Additionally, the kinds of compliance as given by mediare (e.g. "Fill out these 500 papers detailing how you provided a pill to aunt Sally") have driven up costs as well. Its another one of those "Great in theory, horrible in practice" arguments.

That is more bad practice than anything which is inherrently wrong with government departments, healthcare inclusive. Maybe you're jaded by the fact that government departments where you live aren't efficient at all. Where I'm from the government is efficient, lean and often as effective as any private company of equivalent size. It is possible to have public services provided in a fashion similar to private companies, afterall I live in a country where corporatisation was a big movement many years ago and has paid dividends,  even our postal service is profitable.

And exists so because you have a very small, homogenous, populace that is rather well educated and cares about their own life and livelihood. America is about 40 times the size, and has exponential degrees of inefficiencies because of it, among the intrinsic regulatory nightmare that is American health care .

Big entities have a way of being inefficient. Your government has a fraction of the bureaucrats ours does. Heck, we have more government workers than you do people. That brings with it some terrible things.