Now, back to the caulking gun!

Once demand gets back to whatever the current limit is again (this year or next year), this severely regressive tax on our economy will be back with a vengeance as we finally start following production down the other side. I wish we had 5 more years to get ready for this (i.e. spend the wasted inflated gas prices on other things this site is focused on).

But I don’t think people want to continue to experiment with transportation energy becoming the equivalent of 4 dollars a gallon, and more, just to see if financial calamity becomes more likely.

That would be very stupid. (But, in this world, there’s more than enough of that to go around .)

It definitely looks like we’ve been on the “bumpy plateau” since 2005, and that the all-time acute Peak for conventional crude was July of 08 at c. 75mpd (while the all-liquids Peak seems stalled at 86-87mpd).

The consensus seems to be that the result of the financial crisis will be that the plateau will bump along somewhat longer at a somewhat lower level than it would otherwise have, but that once descent sets in it’ll be more precipitous.

The most unexpected thing about all this is that everyone expected that descent would set in first and provoke the big economic crisis. Instead the bubble burst first and dictated the Peak.

So it turned out to be an above-ground factor after all. Go figure…

Still, what was the proximate cause of the mortgage crisis? What started the defaults landsliding? To whatever extent it was a combination of higher fuel prices slamming commuters, higher food prices (driven by agrofuel mandates) hitting consumers, and higher interest rates (affected by these higher commodity prices) triggering ARM hikes, all three of these clobbering financially tenuous houseowners at once, to whatever extent that was it, it was in a way nervous energy markets which lie at the root of it.

Peak Oil’s ways can be sneaky.

Although this seems like an outlier – and I have not seen this report mentioned elsewhere – that kind of supply crunch over the next 6 years would be catastrophic for the economy. Agriculture, transportation… we would be crippled.

On the other hand, it would make achieving whatever targets we set in Copenhagen a snap! or ?

We all know that oil is a finite resource. We all know that chasing the chimera of perpetual growth will, over time, increase demand, unless we do things radically different.

Why then do we fall for any effort that would take those resources that are becoming increasingly scarece and valuable and use them up as fast as we can. The only ones who will profit from this are those who are in a position to deliver the alternatives, or as the Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia told 60 Minutes, “Who has more sun than we do?”

When the American Petroleum Institute does their ad that says we have enough oil and gas in North America to fuel our cars and heat our homes for the next 60 years, why is no one asking “then what?”

I have asked this same question since I used it to ridicule Richard Pombo in 2006. The immediate economic gain of using up these resources as fast as we can is not worth the long term cost of having nothing left in the tank. I can think of no set of actions that is more likely to ruin the US economy as well as endanger all our futures, than this insane urge to drill more, use more. It is time to stop digging.

Wes Rolley
CoChair: EcoAction Committee, Green Party US

What were prices like during the Great Depression?