Oil. Demand outstrips supply.

[fedsron2us]

Oil production may not have peaked but there is growing evidence that within the next twelve months demand will outstrip supply

http://www.reuters.com/financeNewsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=6152218

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/05/BUGKB8JI2G1.DTL

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0905oilfuture05.html

This story is breaking out all across the mainstream media. It looks like oil is going to be heading a lot higher than $50 a barrel in a years time.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Jimmy Carter

tried to get this country on the track of renewable energy, but Reagan used dirty tricks and lies to take over the Presidency. Can't help but wonder what might have happened if Jimmy had been in office until 1984....

[bahrbearian]

2. We wouldn't be fighting wars for Oil.

[opihimoimoi]

3. We are a spoiled lot, thinking we can live forever on fossil fuel

we waste, misuse, and think not of conservation for the future...

Thus we tinker with FAMINE and EXTINCTION

[da_chimperor]

4. Nobody really knows WHEN we'll run out of oil

I've read an estimate that within 3 to 5 years that oil will be at or around $200 dollars a barrel. Now that is a wake-up call. Even if it's not true, the possibility of such a vital resource becoming so expensive so quickly should be more than enough to make people realize that oil won't last forever, and may be gone sooner rather than later.

[arcos]

9. the Earth will never run out of oil...

because eventually it will be too expensive to extract. The real problem is when peak oil is reached... after it, comes a brief plateau and then a price explosion.

[fedsron2us]

5. Outsourcing to India and China does not help the situation

You will often hear pundits in the media stating that oil price rises do not matter because the "economy is not as dependent on oil as it was in the 1970's". In fact what has happened is that the energy use has merely been moved offshore along with America's factories and jobs. It will still ultimately show up in the price of goods. Worse industry in countries such as China are even less efficient in their energy usage than the USA. As a consequence more fossil fuel is consumed to produce a given amount of goods. This means that the peak oil crisis is likely to hit sooner rather than later. It will also make the global fallout even harder to manage than if just the USA, Japan and Europe were involved.

[hatrack]

6. Yeah, OUR economy is not as dependent on oil - China's another story

One big reason exploding demand over there isn't just the roaring economy. It's the crappy electrical grid.

Thanks to problems both in supply shortfalls and with physical/technical problems, every major industrial facility in China has banks of diesel generators to pick up the slack WHEN the electricity goes out. Even the Three Gorges powerplant, when it's up an running at planned output, isn't going to be able to produce enough.

[treepig]

11. really? you're not aware of the "carter doctrine?"

from http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/03/ma_273_01.html

In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." To back up this doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an "over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

of course, today it's necessary to replace the soviet boogeyman with the terrorism boogeyman - but the underlying concept is the same.

more, form http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_CIA_Taliban.html

President Jimmy Carter immediately declared that the invasion jeopardized vital U.S. interests, because the Persian Gulf area was "now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan. But the Carter administration's public outrage at Russian intervention in Afghanistan was doubly duplicitous. Not only was it used as an excuse for a program of increased military expenditure that had in fact already begun, but the U.S. had in fact been aiding the mujahideen for at least the previous six months, with precisely the hope of provoking a Soviet response. Former CIA director Robert Gates later admitted in his memoirs that aid to the rebels began in June 1979. In a candid 1998 interview, Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter's national security adviser, confirmed that U.S. aid to the rebels began before the invasion:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would....
That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.... The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."

The Carter administration was well aware that in backing the mujahideen it was supporting forces with reactionary social goals, but this was outweighed by its own geopolitical interests. In August 1979, a classified State Department report bluntly asserted that "the United States' larger interest...would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." That same month, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, State Department spokesperson Hodding Carter piously announced that the U.S. "expects the principle of nonintervention to be respected by all parties in the area, including the Soviet Union."

i suspect that on some planets mr. carter would be in a war-crimes prison, on ours he's given the nobel peace prize

:freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak: :freak:

[NNadir]

7. I think very highly of Jimmy Carter, but...

we need to be aware that his programs, while correct in emphasizing conservation, were far from perfect.

His program was about energy independence more than they were about sustainable energy. Specifically he had a very heavy reliance on "syn-fuels" by which he meant liquid fuels made from coal.

In Jimmy Carter's time, people had a poor appreciation of the risks of Greenhouse warming, but the syn fuels program would not have been kind to the future. This is not to say that they weren't preferable to Reagan's non-policy, but even if Carter had been re-elected, we would still be facing an environmental catastrophe.

[ramapo]

8. Reagan deserves only part of the blame

Most of it goes to the American people who threw Carter under the bus in favor of Reagan's "Morning in America" crap. Carter took energy conservation and independence seriously. His recommendations that Americans limit their energy usage was turned against him as Reagan took the "No limits for America" plank. Reagan won and one of the first things he did was get rid of the solar panels atop the White House.

Nothing much has changed in 24 years except we're so much worse off.
A quarter-century binge has brought us to the brink of peak oil and serious environmental problems. For the most part, America is oblivious, fixated on personalities and other trivia.

Unfortunately our leaders are a reflection of our society. The idea that there might be limits is strictly off-limits. While Kerry might enact better environmental and energy policies, you don't hear him really talking about the serious problems facing us. I'm not particularly hopeful that he will address these issues any better that our friends Clinton/Gore did.

Events will eventually define the problem to all Americans. Of course by then it'll be too late.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. The Irony

Development of better technologies -- from both ecological and renewability points of view -- would require capital investment and spur economic growth.

In other words, surviving an uncertain future could be profitable.

(And, please, no lectures about the evils of profit -- I'm not addressing the issue of who gets what cut of the pie. I'd prefer it be shared by a very large number of people, but I don't make the rules.)

I can only conclude that there's a major effort by the entrenched energy industries (and their financiers) to turn us away from alternative technologies. It's not exactly a dastardly conspiracy so much as a set of financial interests which discourage development.

For instance, most of the private-enterprise energy companies simply provide energy in exchange for money. What would happen, given some form of inexpensive photovoltaic or wind technology, if individuals became active parts of the energy grid, selling back what they couldn't use? Obviously, such a system could become very profitable to everyone involved -- but not to the current crop of Captains of Industry.

Ain't that always how it works out?

--bkl