Seems like we'll need a separate thread on combating the growing threat of vegetarian terrorists, or not. Thanks for the levity. The rest of this post is not responding specifically to MRiGnS, since I generally agree.

A laissez-faire attitude will not necessarily solve the energy problem. It may... if we get to a cost level that motivates clever science and industry soon enough to keep society stable. Dynamic systems like energy supply and demand are not necessarily stable systems. They can crash and burn if things go badly. This is similar to why we have a Fed, to keep the stock market from crashing so deeply that we can't recover in a generation. In the case of energy, if we don't create a practical alternative before we lose what we have we might lose the capacity to produce the alternative.

Eventually the forces of nature and economics will come through, but that might be after a return to the dark ages reduces population and standard of living enough to compensate. Do we want to wait for another Renaissance? It may not be so dire, but why not hedge our bets? Jared Diamond's book "Collapse!" has many examples of unstable ecological situations that produced bad ends.

I'm for making petroleum energy much more expensive now through either taxes or a carbon credit marketplace. We have to sometimes tickle the marketplace to strive for certain desirable aims. People just aren't going to change without a bit more incentive. The marketplace will still get to pick the best alternative.