Anyone who doesn't think there's a "post-newspaper" economy hasn't been paying attention to circulation and ownership data for newspapers. Note that Mr. Payne's article, and the subsequent discussion, are taking place online. That - and the myriad efforts of the past two decades to find ways to 'monetize' such online activity - seem to suggest a pretty clear 'post-newspaper economy.'
That aside, it would be encouraging to see fewer polemics and more thoughtful discussion. There are many excellent reasons for seeking out alternatives to carbon, and dependence on foreign oil is not the most significant of them. Burning carbon contributes to the poisoning of the atmosphere, with both direct and indirect implications for the health of individuals and the ecology. The carbon fuels he cites are finite, and finding new technologies to squeeze out the harder to exploit doesn't address these issues. There are renewable carbon fuels out there - we could always build wood-burning steam tractors - but the efficient carbon fuels are finite, and fracking and other such techniques merely buys a little time without addressing the root issue: we are collectively consuming more energy than can be sustained, and we are damaging the environment in the process.

There are any number of prudent steps we could be taking now, some as simple as rearranging our cities to reduce the number of miles people travel in cars every day.
It is those who believe that the 'market' will magically produce the answers when they are necessary who are indulging in religion.

The free market is probably the soundest general basis for an economy that we know of, but that doesn't make it adequate to all necessary decisions. The urban smog problems of the '70s were not solved by the market, for example. It's unlikely that the infants, elderly, and sick who were most affected by the pollution spent enough combined to cause the market to make air scrubbers and factory relocation an economically sound choice. Detroit automakers have consistently resisted incorporating life-saving technology in cars - do you recall the bitter resistance to airbags? These are just two examples of cases in which the government, acting as the agent of the people, made necessary and beneficial decisions that the markets were not making on their own.
In other words, your brief description of how markets work is correct but simplistic and incomplete - and any faith that all problems can be or will be solved by market action requires a mystical faith indeed.

I caught that 'rearrange the cities' too. Someone's a fan of Kelo perhaps?

And also the standard talking point about carbon. Hey Bosch. You don't want to add carbon to the atmosphere? Stop breathing!

The fact that people cannot live near where they work, is the result of people like you, who decided that govt should make such decisions for the people. As to your claim that carbon is poisoning the atmosphere, nothing could be further from the truth. We need more CO2 in the atmospher, much more. There was a time when CO2 in the atmosphere was 7000 ppm, not the puny 300 that we suffer with today. At that time plant life flourished and animal life saw it's biggest expansion in our planet's history.

Carbon fuels are finite, but in the hundreds of years they will take to be exhausted, the free market will have plenty of time to develop alternatives. Oil will not just run out. One day it's there, the next day it's gone. It will gradually increase in price. Each increase will result in people figuring out how to use less, produce more, and find alternatives.

It's not magic, it's basic human nature. It's those who think that govt diktat can improve on those market forces who believe in magic.

Anyone who seriously proposes wood fired, steam powered tractors has completely taken himself out of the running when it comes to be taken seriously.

Well, no, the reason we don't live near where we work is the result of the '50s growth in the middle class, widespread car ownership, urban flight, and development and zoning decisions based on seemingly endless land, endless cheap energy, and plenty of space on the roads for the cars. With endless population growth and, as you correctly note, finite carbon energy resources, the assumptions underlying our current urban and suburban layouts turn out to be badly dated. The Germans have been wrestling with this longer than we, and have some excellent zoning systems in place that are worth looking at. I could walk or bike to anything I needed in both cities where I lived in Germany, one very urban and one suburban.

Of course government can improve on market forces. It's probably worth pointing out that market forces, left to themselves, had factory workers living in poverty and working in horrible conditions. The market isn't a mystical force that naturally finds the best solution to any problem - it's simply people engaged in commerce, with all the good and bad that people tend to do. The relationship of government to the market is not unlike the relationship of government to traffic: government is not going to tell you where to drive, but to suggest that we abandon traffic regulations because individuals will naturally find the best traffic patterns on their own is a bit thick.
I don't think that anyone has suggested that oil will simply run out. However, you should probably pay attention to the delta between world peak production capacity and world demand: it's growing very narrow indeed, and the problems begin when those lines cross, not when "the oil runs out." However, you're onto something by pointing out the value of the price mechanism in finding alternatives. Driving the price up through taxes, as is done in Europe, would engage those market dynamics while there is still sufficient slack world production capacity to avoid catastrophic failure. To wait for the prices to rise on their own requires a religious faith that there are solutions already in the barrel just waiting to become price-competitive, and that's simply not the case.
As for being taken seriously, you took the time to pen a 4-paragraph response, so I'll let your actions speak for themselves. To put your mind at ease, though, read the sentence on wood-burning again, and this time through, note that the wood-burning steam power is offered as an acknowledgement that not all carbon fuels are non-renewable - but the renewable ones tend to be inefficient and dirty. Since we both agree that going back to wood-burning steam power is a bad idea, and since we both agree that the oil will run out, it's clear that we need to find an alternative. I simply find the "someone will do something someday when the market shows it's time" to be remarkably short-sighted.

The Lefties' incessant bleating about the "subsidies to the oil industry" never are set out in detail. Most of the "subsidies" are in the form of oil firms being allowed to deduct depreciation expenses, the same as any other extractive company or those in manufacturing. I urge all to ask for
the details of these subsidies when dealing with the loony left. I bet $10,000 that they will be
unable to explain.

Here’s a breakdown of the annual subsidies. (External Link )
Oil, gas, coal receive much greater share than all alternatives combined. Some are tax breaks and some are direct subsidies, but either go directly to the bottom line of the company receiving them:

"Oil and gas: $41 billion
President Obama wants Congress to chop $3.6 billion in 2012 oil and gas tax breaks for a total of $46.2 billion over the next decade. Among Mr. Obama’s targets: a nearly century-old oil and gas industry tax deduction for the costs of preparing drill sites and a manufacturer's tax break granted the oil industry in 2004.
The number is significant, but still little more than one-tenth of the federal subsidies that oil and gas companies might receive over 10 years. Adjusted for inflation, they currently receive about $41 billion in annual subsidies annually. That amounts to more than half – 52 percent – of total benefits distributed to energy sectors by the federal government.

Coal: $8 billion
In second place among fossil fuels, the US coal industry reaps about $8 billion in subsidies annually – or about 10 percent of total federal largess. This includes tax breaks, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars on research into carbon capture and storage.

Those figures mean that subsidies to industries involved in fossil fuels total about $52 billion when adjusted for inflation – about two-thirds all federal energy subsidies."