Am I wrong if I say that actually 90 $  per barrel has lead to a halt int he increase of consumption in the developed countries.. that is.. Europe, Japan, Australia US and Canada consume tthe same amount of oil as threee years ago.. Is this right?

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Maybe more than anything else, the price underscores the  frightening rate at which the money becomes steadily less valuable, its increasing worthlessness and devaluation which are coupled with and encouraged by inflation.
Who's been in a supermarket lately? A good part of this is being brought to you courtesy of the U.S. foreign debt and the U.S. custom of destroying its foreign debt by destroying its currency. Will the world ever tell the U.S. where to get off and stop servicing it? No, because I guess the people who make such decisions are in on the game. Who remembers the hideous stagflation of the 1970s when the Vietnam debt had to be written off? Well, I'll try not to.

I am optimistic.

When the oil companies have squeezed the last drop of profit from the people of the world, someone will go to John D. Rockefeller's safe and take out the plans for the cheap, non polluting alternative to oil. We will then be saved.

Hurrah for big oil, altruism with an inhuman face!

European Tribune - Countdown to $100 oil (51) - we'll never see 100mbd

There's no recession.

This is debatable, I think. Inflation is being systematically under-reported in both the UK and US, and I suspect that if the true growth figures were available they'd either be close to zero or negative.

European Tribune - Comments - Countdown to $100 oil (51) - we'll never see 100mbd

Which points to a simple conclusion: oil is still much too cheap.

Or possibly, politicians are stupid and incapable of much in the way of forward planning.

Never mind. We may have an attack on Iran soon, which will do wonders for oil pricing.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/1/926/88320

With the ExxonMobil results included and an added conclusion:

And, if I may again say so:

• a gas tax would ensure that some of the money from gasoline price increases stay with us for useful investment rather than going in the pockets of unfriendly regimes elsewhere;
• blaming the oil majors (or speculators) for price manipulation is mostly silly. Their production is declining, their power is waning, and their hold on the market increasingly tenuous. The main drivers today are fast demand growth from the world economy, and the inability of the supply side to keep up - or, to some extent, the unwillingness of some countries to invest as much as we'd like, a perfectly rational decision in today's context: why rush on the market today a product that you know will get more valuable in the future?

The ONLY thing we can control in the long run is our demand. Time to work on demand-side policies rather than supply side policies (hmmm - sounds like a good programme for the Democrats...)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I for the first time read a few of the older ones of these on kos and followed threads where they happened to lead. Slow day at work. Good stuff...

Some very famous flame wars a few of these occasioned. Quite surprising, I'd have thought. Energy isn't exactly the most controversial topic in left blogostan, unless you are trying to defend Exxon's handling of the Valdez crash or somesuch...

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

... in terms of US CPI ... having passed the level of 1979 in terms of US GDP-deflator by about 10% ... and so we are still in the range of the previous response to "2007 consumer-purchasing-power-dollars $100 oil" from 1979, which included substantial improvements in technical efficiency of the private motor-road transport system, until the motor vehicle lobby was able to stall that progress.

Which means that its $5/gallon where we in the US start to hit serious trouble based on the price of crude oil alone.

However, the other change since 1979 is the much greater proportion of crude oil imported from abroad, so that in addition to direct price effects, we are also exposed to direct Keynesian effects from an increase in our trade deficit as a result of an oil price spike.

And that risk could be amplified, if China and other sources of much of our consumer goods are pressed into a position of raising their currency peg against the dollar. With the per unit cost of so many imports held stable, the US has not seen a J-curve effect from its currency devaluations, and so our trade deficit has been tapering off in response to the falling US dollar.

However, if we get the double-whammy on our external account of an oil price surge, and an substantial increase in per-unit price of imports, we are going to lose the primary motor for economic expansion that is offsetting the ongoing collapse of the housing market.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

whereby

1. higher gas prices lead to domestic economic growth in oil exporting countries, which leads to

2. those countries consuming a greater proportion of the oil they produce, which leads to

3. an effective "demand peak" where they cease to export oil before their supplies run out, which

4. takes oil off the international oil markets even faster than depletion rates would suggest, which

5. puts more pressure on the remaining oil exporting countries, whose fields are also subject to the same pressures

You gotta love the NYT flat-earther Thomas Friedman:

I was visiting an Indian village 350 miles east of Hyderabad and got to watch a very elderly Indian man undergo an EKG in a remote clinic, while a heart specialist, hundreds of miles away in Bangalore, watched via satellite TV and dispensed a diagnosis. This kind of telemedicine is the I.T. revolution at its best. But what struck me most was that just underneath the TV screen, powering the whole endeavor, were 16 car batteries -- the E.T., energy technology, revolution, at its worst.

Some 250 million Indians today have cellphones. Many of them are people who make just $2 or $3 a day. More and more are getting access to computers and the Internet, even in villages. But only 85 percent of Indian villages are electrified -- and that is being generous, since many still don't have reliable 24/7 quality power.

If only ... If only we could make a breakthrough in clean, distributed power -- an E.T. revolution -- it could drive the I.T. revolution into every forgotten corner of the world to create jobs, light up schools and tap the innovative prowess of rural populations, like India's 700 million villagers.

If only... Don't people learn any basic physics anymore? Energy is not something you can create out of nothing; energy cannot be concentrated at will.

Can't we ever assume that the energy revolution might not come at all?