---snip---
Here, I hasten to remind the reader that peak is peak, meaning right now we are all operating on the basis of a lot of oil flowing around the world. The comfort level is still high. The factories are still humming in China, and the six-lane commuting corridors are still full of big cars around Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Minneapolis. The problem is that the oil supply will soon steadily diminish at a rate of at least three percent a year, and that necking down of supply is likely to be expressed in greater geopolitical friction and turmoil between the great nations who crave oil. The United States entered into the military phase of this turbulence before any other nation. We used our superpower status to set up a centrally-located Middle East garrison in Iraq, under the idealistic cover story that we were removing a dangerous head-of-state and helping to set up a model democracy that would invite us to stick around the vicinity indefinitely, and thus retain some control over the deportment of other oil-rich states in the region.
The foregoing is the background of my predictions for 2006, which will be the year that the hardships and difficulties I lump together as The Long Emergency get some serious traction.
The world oil allocation system is now so fragile that any disturbance in one producing region can send damaging shock waves around the planet. There is no more "swing producer." The United States squeaked through the huge loss of oil production capacity this fall by taking oil from our own strategic petroleum reserves and from Europe's. These actions kept oil prices in the high fifty-dollar-range through the holidays, giving Americans a false sense of festive security. Those withdrawals are now over. Global demand for oil is still increasing. The strategic reserves will now have to be refilled (they're called strategic reserves for a reason). This will start oil prices moving upward again -- they already have moved above $61 as of this morning.
I can't predict whether some maniac will drive a Zodiac boat into a tanker in the straits of Hormuz, or fire a shoulder-launched missile at an Arabian refinery. If nothing like that happens, the first year of post-peak will express itself in turbulent oil markets. Fear of not getting enough will rule. Futures will be overbought and then dumped or shorted and then overbought again. This will at least increase the violence of the ratcheting effect in the markets. Overall I expect to see $100-a-barrel oil at some point this year. Last year I made a bet with a friend that oil would end 2005 at $75. I lost the bet. But it is a fact that the price of oil altogether ended the year 40 percent higher than 2004, so it is not as if the markets did not show extraordinary stress.
---snip---
I have snipped out everything that doesn;t relate to the ME and Energy. Kunstler has a LW and malthusian bias - but he identifies and raises a lot of valid issues. Worth a read
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