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Obama seems to understand part of the nature of the energy problem (unlike the morons in the "drill, baby, drill" crowd), with a recent interview with Time touching on some of the problems with industrial agriculture - Swampland. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

Amazing photos of the aftermath of a powerful natural gas pipeline explosion.

REFINED, distilled and then burnt, petrol's explosive power propels the world's largest economy. But its soaring price is punching holes in the US engine - and the rest of us are anything but immune. The globe's thirstiest energy consumer is reeling from high petrol prices, with a barrel of oil hitting $US137 ($145) on Thursday's markets. Even if there is still division about whether the high point of global production - "peak oil" - has been reached, most analysts agree that cheap oil is finished.