Thats the problem. It's really hard to do it because the only thing you will find on the surface is articles where the country accepts the deal. It's like Iraq right now. You'll find articles related to deals we made in buying their oil but what a lot of people don't realize is that those deals are imbalanced much like the deals made after the Chinese Opium Wars. We set up a deal to loan money to these countries at a fixed interest rate. The condition is the money they get from us has to be used to purchase our contractors to come in and build these things. Our contractors (private sector) in turn end up cutting corners and do a really lousy job as to save money (things that you heard of during the progressive era in America). Another part of the deal is, if we loan this money out (which btw ends up coming right back to us through our contractors) they have to sell us whatever resource we want from them. In this case oil. Now you would think this is a great deal because they can use the money that we give them (petro dollars) to be used in developing social programs and all that good stuff but in reality they still have to pay back the interest on the loans that they borrowed in the first place. They use top economists to make the loan program sound awesome but in reality they fixed it to where the interest rate is so high they can never pay it back so as we give them more money for the oil they use that money to constantly pay their debt + interest rate to us.

So the big picture here is we are not only recycling the money back into our own hands but we are also progressivly draining its economy, oil, and its crappy infrastructure which was created by our own contractors. This is why there is little progress in Iraq and many other developing countries.

Like I said, its one of those facts that you have to do research on and I wish I was able to hang on to all of the things that I used to understand this but unfortunately the only thing that I kept was the nonfictional book written by John Perkins, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". It's a very fascinating read and the guy is actually legitimate. This wasn't made by some conspiracy theorist but an actual Economists who worked with this company and his job was to confront the leaders of these countries and try to convince them to take a loan from us.

Anyway....in regards to the algae thing. I heard about this a while back and it sounds like a very promising idea but at least for the moment it's something that will take a long time before it can meet the demands of our country. We have many, many ways to ween ourselves away from oil, at least to a significant degree, but the problem is that our policy makers are finely meshed with corporations who don't want to change our dependency on oil because for them, oil makes money. My guess is they're going to ride this out as long as they can before it gets so bad to where America can't function without transcending which brings up an interesting question...will it be too late by the time our government wants to change things?