What we need is not to cap the oil prices but to give them a decent floor

Sir the real oil crisis occurred in 1998 when the price of barrel fell under $10 per barrel and the Economist wrote in "The next shock?" March 1999, that "in today's condition the price would head down towards $5", and this is what primarily explains the current high prices of oil. Had the consumer countries acknowledged the growth in demand that for instance China would bring to the market (IEA did not say a word about it for years) and expressed their willingness to enter into those reasonable long term contracts that would have allowed producing countries to make the massive investments needed we would most probably have faced a completely different energy outlook.

From this perspective Ricardo Hausmann "Biofuels can match oil production" November 7, and that has 95 countries investing billions of billions in cultivating 700m of acres just in order to cap the price setting capacity of OPEC seems to say the least an astonishing proposition. The question to ask Hausmann is what he will do with those 700m acres when oil having been at last given such a real price floor really starts the pumps. Why don't you give OPEC a price floor without having to go into the environmental and economic nightmare of cultivating 700m of acres that will have to be subsidized in the future and that we pray will not include the Amazon?