Well, some of his arguments are pretty specious, like the amount of fossil energy required to produce anything: much of that is transportation, and much of that is flexible.
Oh yeah, and the notion that being energy-conscious is counterproductive shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.
Okay, if your costs are $1500, and $1000 of that is fossil fuel, if you save $500 on fossil fuel, you move from being 67% to 50% reliant on fossil fuel. Now if, per his example, you invest that money in the bank, and the bank invests in other businesses at 10-12 times the amount you invest, if those companies do the same as you (reasonable as you yourself decided to do it), then much less of that investment money is going into fossil fuels that otherwise -- but even more likely -- if you cut the customer a break, then fossil fuels become a smaller part of the pie.
and how does he justify saying that researching alternate energy resources will result in war with the Chinese?
Still, he's right about a couple of things. For the last 150 years, we've seen incredible growth based on an unrenewable energy resource. We're approaching the end of that resource, and things are gonna get hairy. Hell, few periods in history feature such a long period as the one some of us (=amurricans since the civil war) have enjoyed without any major social or economic upheaval.
Peak oil may be 10 years out, but it's coming, and it's gonna be nasty, especially for countries that have built their infrastructure around the automobile. Alternate energies are nice, but the most reasonable of them are expensive compared to oil. Batteries and Fuel Cells are not energy sources.
Oil is what forestalled a Malthusian crisis... for the past few decades we've been seeing the first twinges of such a crisis in the poorer, overpopulated areas of the world. When oil beomes pricey, it's a problem.
