The World Economic Forum ended a week ago. That means the jet lag is gone, the expense reports are largely completed (if not yet reimbursed), and normal life has resumed.

Was it worth it? That's the question I posed at the outset, wondering if the substance could possibly outweigh the windbaggery. My unequivocal answer: Yes. More

Attendees of the World Economic Forum crave validation. Validation that they learned enough things or met enough people or conducted enough business to justify the time and expense of spending nearly a week in Switzerland. One form of validation, I’ve learned, is to confidently believe one understands the mood of the conference, which by inference is the mood of the world’s elites regarding, well, the state of the world.

Candidates for topics of the conference that concluded Sunday in the Swiss ski-resort town of Davos include a commitment to alternative energy and climate-change mitigation; banker bashing and the fragile economy; and the rise of protectionism.

In my opinion, the most important topic was one that received relatively little direct commentary in Davos: the dramatically heightened tension between the United States and China.

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On my first day at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, I was checking email in a lounge at the main conference center when I spotted Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler and Owen Van Natta of MySpace. I told them I wanted to say hello but that my overarching goal for the conference was to NOT spend too much time with Internet people. “How’s that working out for you?” Van Natta asked. “Not so well,” I replied.

Indeed, my hotel, an undistinguished but totally adequate three-star lodge a 20-minute walk from the center of the action, is something of the Internet and academic ghetto. In the lobby I’ve regularly bumped into Max Levchin of Slide, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Ning’s Gina Bianchini, among others. Thursday morning I shared a shuttle bus from the hotel with Elizabeth Useem, wife of Wharton scholar Michael and mom of my former Fortune colleague Jerry.

As the week progressed I met plenty of people without connections to Silicon Valley or Fortune Magazine. On a shuttle bus to  the conference I was seated next to a man in flowing orange robes who teased me for commenting on how cold it was. He wore neither boots nor gloves and explained to me that in his home in Nepal there is no heat. His name was Matthieu Ricard, and among other things he is a translator for the Dalai Lama. This was a true Davos experience.

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The CEO of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, lashed out at the Obama administration Thursday, lamenting the oversupply of “rhetoric”  from major oil-consuming nations regarding energy independence. Without naming the U.S. president directly, Khalid Al Falih couldn’t have been clearer who he was referring to. He called pervasive talk from nations that want to wean themselves from an addiction to foreign oil, a common trope in U.S. environmental circles, “unachievable and misleading to the public.”

Al Falih anchored an extraordinary collection of representatives of major oil producers at a morning session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Chaired by consultant and prizewinning author Daniel Yergin, the panel provided a heavy dose of reality into a debate often dominated in Western media and policy circles by a hopeful yearning for alternative energy.

Some highlights:

• Tony Hayward, group chief executive of BP (BP), said that though the recession certainly had crimped energy demand in developed countries, BP is forecasting a 40% increase in energy consumption among non-OECD nations over the next 20 years. Furthermore, for all the development initiatives in alternative energy, oil and gas will remain predominant. “Even in the most aggressive climate change legislation perceived, hydrocarbons will represent 80% of energy consumption over next 20 years,” Hayward said. He also said that while gasoline demand is now in “structural decline” in Europe and won’t again exceed 2007 levels, that decline will be more than offset by increased demand in China alone.

• Peter Voser, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, also offered his view of energy “realism.” Change in the energy industry, he said, doesn’t work like an on-off switch. “It takes 25 to 30 years to gain 1% of global market share from the moment we start investing in a major project,” he said.

• Ilham Aliyev, president of major oil and gas producer Azerbaijan, said 85% of the country’s GDP is now industrial – as opposed to energy —  up from zero when Azerbaijan became independent of the Soviet Union. He didn’t say it, but his country’s achievement is in marked contrast to Russia, which remains heavily reliant on oil revenues.

• The sole representative of energy consumers was Andrew Liveris, chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical (DOW), which bills itself as the largest energy customer in the U.S. He said Dow’s energy costs jumped from $8 billion to $32 billion when the price of oil spiked. Interestingly, Liveris flagged the impact of oil-price volatility on his business. Normal hedging, he said, becomes impossible in such a climate, which in terms crimps investment given the uncertainty produced by an inability to hedge. Liveris said he supports neither a carbon tax, which merely would be passed on to consumers, nor a cap and trade system that rewards speculators. He said without elaboration that he would support initiatives that change the behavior of energy consumers.

BP’s Hayward also gave an update on his company’s efforts in Iraq, where it is in the process of redeveloping an oil field BP discovered in 1953. The field is producing 1 million barrels of oil per day now, he said. BP intends for its investments in the field to boost production to 3 million barrels by 2020. Overall, Hayward predicted Iraq will be producing 10 million barrels a day in 10 years. That would be a five-fold increase and a gigantic accomplishment.

The star of the show by far was Aramco’s Al Falih. He believes the “peak oil” debate is dead, though it caused damage in the form of price increases and volatility. He said Saudi Arabia has 4 million barrels per day of idle oil capacity at the moment and that the country continued to invest in its fields through the recession, adding 2 million barrels of capacity last year despite the global decline in demand. His beef is that though Saudi Arabia continues to invest in production, “we don’t see reciprocal assurances from customers, by which I mean policymakers, to signal to us a long-term commitment.”

There was no discord on this panel of the global oil elite. With no time for Q&A, if anyone sympathetic to the Obama administration’s energy policy was in the room, they had no opportunity for rebuttal.

The preferred exercise at Davos so far is hand-wringing.

Rajan: The finance prof frets about the U.S. economy. Photo: University of Chicago.

Concern over the future of the economy and finger pointing over what went wrong have dominated the first day’s discussions. There’s even an emerging buzz expression to capture the fears of the financierati. It is "10 and 10," and refers to the unhealthy combination of 10% unemployment in the United States with 10% economic growth in China. You can’t have it both ways, goes the concern: Continued economic weakness in the U.S., with the attendant cuts in consumption, inevitably will weigh on the growth of export-driven China.

Raghuram Rajan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago articulated the 10 and 10 worry at a morning session of the conference. The goal at Davos is to look forward and to make suggestions for improving the world. But the financial world remains fixated on its problems of the past three years. Famously bearish economist Nouriel Roubini sees a continued weak economy, particularly among the industrial powers. He predicts a continued credit crunch in the U.S. in the second half of the year, when fiscal stimulus runs out, making things worse. Roubini flagged another concern, global sovereign debt crises. More

Liza Minnelli once sang a song about a gal who traveled around the world to meet the guy next door. Two of the more interesting presentations I heard Tuesday at the DLD tech conference in Munich were about California companies I know well. (DLD, one of whose organizers is the Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, is for many  a warmup to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where I'm headed next.)

Why Facebook  Won't Go Public

Jim Breyer, the investor with Accel Partners, emphatically ruled out a 2010 IPO for Facebook, where he sits on the board. He cited the usual reasons. Being private is good. The public boards he serves on spend a disproportionate amount of time on accounting, legal and Sarbanes-Oxley issues and too little on product strategy. Facebook’s goals, Breyer said, including attracting a billion users, forging relationships with any and all Web companies on the company’s Facebook Connect platform and crafting more relationships with media companies.

A major reason Facebook can afford to be patient is the hundreds of millions of dollars that Russia’s DST has invested. Its capital gives Facebook the latitude to invest in its business without tapping public markets. Interestingly, DST isn’t a venture-capital fun. Yuri Milner, its founder, also appeared at DLD and stressed this advantage. “We are patient capital,” he said. “We have no need to return capital to investors. More

A "Davos virgin" speculates about the World Economic Forum.

I head to Europe this week to attend the World Economic Forum annual meeting, better known by the name of Swiss town in which it is held, Davos. I am a Davos virgin, so I intend to see the conference through the eyes of the newcomer that I am and to  drink up its global celebrities, big thinkers and attendant hangers on (read: journalists, consultants, and so on).

Upon informing a Wall Street source that I’m embarking on my first Davos voyage, she remarked: “I would love to hear all about Davos – how much of it is forwarding policy goals — and how much of it is socializing.” Any conference of almost any size is by definition some mixture of windbaggery and substance. (I sincerely hope the conference that I will co-chair in July, Fortune Brainstorm Tech, will have more of the latter and less of the former.) By reputation, Davos appears to be exemplary at both, with extra dollops of earnestness.

The luggage tags the conference organizers sent me ahead of time read: “World Economic Forum: Committed to improving the state of the world.” More

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Electronic Arts provides fresh evidence of technology's ability to change everything–maybe.

Can Electronic Arts win at the game of (tech) life? Image: Electronic Arts.

Remember that awful, overused, ill understood word from the tech bubble? Disintermediation. It was what was going to happen to all "old" businesses, like retailers and newspapers and brokerage houses. The theory went that any company that wasn't serving its customers on the Internet would watch the Internet step between it and them. It was going to spell doom for all sorts of "brick-and-mortar" concerns, ink-stained publications and trusted but dated advisory firms.

The funny thing about disintermediation is that it didn't happen. Then it did. The old-line companies survived the tech bubble as they waved goodbye to Webvan and Pets.com and DLJdirect.com and so on. Then, after most industries got back to normal the destruction continued. Online concerns really did inflict damage on the old guard, and the damage is visible today in publishing, music, retailing, television and financial services.

The funny thing is that even the disintermediators seem to have a hard time resisting the next wave. More

I had a small, Twitter-hosted dustup recently with Trevor Loy, a pleasant fellow who, when he is not Twittering, brings truth and justice to the world via the agency of venture capital. Loy was hot and bothered over some turn of events in Congress having to do with immigration policy. Many entrepreneurs are immigrants, you see. And because venture capital equals entrepreneurialism, the proposed congressional action might harm VCs, which, in turn, would grievously harm the U.S. economy. This, Loy, explained, is because fully 21% of the U.S. economy is attributed to revenue earned by "venture-backed" companies.

Where, I wondered, did this startlingly encouraging statistic come from? Loy was kind enough to supply me the link to a report paid for by the National Venture Capital Association. Thank goodness for the hard work the NVCA does to help us understand the good VCs spread throughout the land. NVCA President Mark Heesen, a savvy Washington hand I've been privileged to chat with over the years, prefaced the report with a few nice words about the industry that employs him. "The data," he wrote, "continues to confirm that venture capital matters deeply, not only to our economy but to everyday lives of Americans, who use venture-backed innovations, work at venture-backed companies and dare to bring new ideas to the market."

Do you feel as warm and tingly as I do after reading that?

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