Paul N. Oliver wrote:
> Not just oil companies but government needs the controls to remain in place
> or the "people" will not need the government.
>
> When you have what you need without the "need" of others to supply your it
> (needs/wants), you will become independent. An independent free thinking
> person is the most dangerous person in the world.
>
> Paul

Abraham Lincoln said during the Lincoln-Doublas debates:

"No man is good enough to govern another man
without that other's consent."  ...which anticipated his later
description, "of the people, by the people" in the Gettysburg address.

(Lincoln, Kennedy and others spoke of the necessity of an informed
population.  A point, I believe, to be more under assault then
government control of oil resources.)

Lincoln also said:

"If all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much,
need of government."

which highlights the need for an apparatus to manage very large projects
and resources like infrastructure, economies, national defense,
exploration, etc.

and to counter that he said:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people
all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

I submit there will always be a need for some form of government for
people to get the big things done.  It also seems it is really beyond
the capacity of any government to completely deceive or manipulate the
public perception of an issue indefinitely.  It may seem like a
government sometimes manages it for a very long time but in the scheme
of things the world has only been running on oil for a little more then
a 100 years, coal a bit longer.

We are on the brink of both more efficient storage and energy generation
technologies and the economics of that will remove oil and coal as the
dominant energy resource.  It may take 10-50 years but it will happen.

When it does I'm sure we'll have a new set of corporations who manage
and run those industries and government will still be in place and
necessary to manage whatever new challenges there are for large populations.

--Wil