Utility companies can raise their prices if they wish. Utility companies had the option to be innovative and pursue solar/wind lease agreements where they would own this generation capacity and it's resale would be more profitable. They chose to stick with the traditional model. This was their choice.

In your model the power bill has 2 components: generation and delivery. You feel that it's fair for the customer to pay both. In the scenario where the homeowner is generating the power, it is the utility that is the customer therefore according to your logic it should be the utility that pays for the delivery of that power. If the homeowner pays delivery charges on the power they use, so too should the utility company on the power they use. Considering the power generation and consumption patterns of a typical home, perhaps the utility companies are not paying the homeowner enough delivery on the power generated...

As the amount of variable supply power grows so to does the demand for storage of that power. The market will force utilities to adapt or die through deploying grid storage. The scenario you speak of is still decades away and we have the technology today to make this work. It will only get more cost effective as time goes by.

Please name the governments you consider pro-ACC

Funding grants are given irrespective of the findings. ...unless you're referring to the funding which comes from the fossil fuel industry.

Do you have examples where Al Gore and the Sierra club are promoting belief over science?

Could you clarify your comment? Are you trying to say that the newspaper was promoting good science? Who is the Church of Environmentalism?

So a public court of law weighs the evidence and agrees that the paper had been careless and indifferent to the facts and in your mind that makes the paper MORE credible?

How can you have an open debate when one side uses lies and personal attacks instead of facts?

It DOES matter how ridiculously wrong one side is when their goal is not to win a debate but to DELAY ACTION. By manufacturing controversy where there is none, one side wins.

I don't think they're surviving any better up here. I have not found a reason to purchase anything from one of their stores for a decade now. At one point they had hard to find components. Now they have what exactly? A small quantity of stuff that can be purchased cheaper elsewhere...

There is one element of oil creation that you forgot: A mechanism to trap the Oil. Otherwise after the hydrocarbon is created it disperses. Finding the trapping mechanism at whatever depth is more important that the age of the oil.

In traditional reserves this trapping mechanism has been a a limestone dome or some such but it doesn't have to be. Technology is now allowing us to exploit other trapping mechanisms (such as shale and sand). This means that we can exploit previously untouchable deposits. If the price of oil rises again, the same thing will happen and we will be awash with 'new' oil. The really scary part of all this is that we are now starting to transition to unconventionals, which are often trapped in different ways, such as methalhydrates frozen in the sea floor. This is a slow motion disaster for the planet as the amount of carbon trapped in these formations dwarfs anything we previously could have exploited.

What does this mean for peak oil? What does peak oil even mean? Does it mean peak conventional production? If so, we may already be there. Does it mean peak hydrocarbon production? In that case we are nowhere near how much we could dig up....

I'm with you man! We need to keep questioning all these fundamentally unsound 'scientific' theories. I mean take Newton and his THEORY of gravity... Call me a denier all you want. I'm not denying the "Science" part of this (Things fall). I am denying the predictive hyperbole from the likes of Issac Newton, who keeps making ridiculous claims, while having a huge gravity footprint (apple diet not withstanding).