Those who can't

Defining what a sanctimonious twat means, the self-described "anarcho-capitalist" Charles Featherstone writes about oil depletion alarmists:

If you're right, you make your bets wisely and profit handsomely, then you could easily jump-start work on the technology and the products that you think will save the world and end the inefficient and nasty use of hydrocarbons. If peak oil is coming – and by that, I mean coming soon – then high oil and gas prices (and imminent peak oil means we haven't seen anything yet) will dictate the economic feasibility of non-hydrocarbon choices. The market many of you don't seem to like very much is going to work in your favor. Have a little faith and work for the future you want, rather than grumbling about how everyone else – like me – who doesn't see things your way is an "idiot" and that we are all "doomed."

Do it. Prove us wrong. And save the world.

He implies that people concerned about oil depletion should invest in oil companies or somehow "jumpstart" technology.

Listen Mr. Featherweight journalist, since you know how to write, I assume you know how to read. So why don't you go out and buy yourself the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Feynman's Lectures on Physics, O'Hanlon's A User's Guide to Vacuum Technology, Kittel's Introduction To Solid State Physics, Reif's Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics and a good nuclear engineering handbook. If you can't find the answers in there, you evidently didn't try hard enough.

In other words, don't wait for us to follow blindly behind your rah-rah sermonizing. Go ahead and knock yourself out. Save us the trouble.

Update: An elliptical thanks to Big Gav, for a perfectly apropos quote courtesy of C.Walken:

"If you want to learn how to build a house, build a house. Don't ask anybody, just build a house."