10 warnings: Big Oil stocks crash 50% by 2020

Yes, we see 10 early warnings that Big Oil stocks are going to trigger an economic collapse by 2020, maybe 50% as gas prices go through your SUV’s sunroof.

A contrarian view? Yes, pump prices already shot up 11% this year. Plus Big Oil cherishes its new role as exporter: Bloomberg’s even predicting the U.S. will “surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2015, and be close to energy self-sufficiency in the next two decades, amid booming output.”

So why worry? Why contrarian? Because a decade ago the Bush Pentagon predicted that by 2020 “an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge” as global “warfare is defining human life.” But, that’s light years away in today’s twitter-brain world where today’s news is so bullish: “100% of economists think yields will rise within six months,” no recession in sight, and junk bonds scream investors want risk again.

So, lighten up, right? Take advice from Mad magazine’s lovable Alfred E. Newman, “What? Me worry?” A cue from Robert Mankoff’s best New Yorker cartoon, where that happy-go-lucky CEO of a too-big-to-fail Wall Street bank is at the podium with welcomed bullish guidance for worry-warts: “While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”

Yes, folks, the American Dream’s roaring. For today. So relax. Indulge me. We all know the collective conscience of America’s time horizon is getting shorter, limited, myopic. Quarterly earnings, maybe. But we’re incapable of seeing beyond, into the future. Year 2020? Fuggetaboutit. Maybe 2014. Even 2016 if you’re a hard-right fan of extreme partisan politics.

But not war, not a global economic collapse in 2020. That’s Stephen King stuff. But today we’re having a Zen moment, in the “Eternal Now.” Enjoying a transcendent “pre-end period,” in a permanent age of “unprecedented profits.” Your brain keeps telling you this is forever. So why worry? Well, folks, here is why: Ten warnings from visionaries who see into a future not oozing with hype, happy talk and wishful thinking:

1. Big Oil’s conspiracy is a fracking ,cracking Zen moment …

Reuters recently reported that Rex Tillerson became a party in a local lawsuit opposing a planned new water tower near his $5 million retirement ranch. Yes, that Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s $40-million-a-year CEO. His neighbors say this eyesore will affect property values. Even Forbes’ Rick Unger couldn’t resist a dig: “The hypocrisy expressed in real life is so sublimely rich that one could never hope to construct a similar scenario out of pure imagination.” Tillerson is signaling a subtle lesson here for Big Oil as more states follow Ohio’s lead, discover there’s a real scientific link between fracking and earthquakes.

2. The bliss of delusional denial when Big Oil profits peak, slide, collapse

“Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions — the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3% a year for a few decades — we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change,” warns Clive Hamilton, Australian economist in “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change.” Soon “the Earth’s climate will enter a chaotic era … One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us.” What? Me worry?

3. Unprecedented profits on a road to irreversible self-destruction

The world has “1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years,” says CEO Tom Donohue of the Big Oil-funded U. S. Chamber of Commerce Yes, 200 years of oil. Too bad it’ll kill us in 50 years, says environmental economist Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone. Why? “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn.” More will overheat Planet Earth. And over in Foreign Policy a resigned McKibben adds, “Act now, we’re told, if we want to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is settled, and the damage has already begun.” The planet is on an “irreversible self-destruct path.”

4. Capitalism’s last, blind race to waste every bit of Planet Earth

Michael Klare warns in “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources,” that “The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion — a crisis that goes beyond ‘peak oil’ to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet’s easily accessible resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claims in areas previously considered too dangerous or remote.” Worse, “the race we are on today is the last of its kind that we are likely to undertake.”

5. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin: ‘You promised me Mars colonies, I got Facebook’

We’re not even trying to solve the big problems of the future, warns Jason Pontin editor-in-chief of the MIT Tech Review in “Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems.” Reason: Because our leaders kowtow to myopic science deniers and Big Oil billionaires with zero moral conscience. America’s lost the ability to think long-term, lacks think-big leaders. And Silicon Valley’s leading innovators prefer social media problems like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Farmville and X-Prize PR hits, while Big Pharma solves the world’s great erectile-dysfunction pandemic.

6. Big Macs in 2014, but in 2050 Earth can’t feed predicted 10 billion

Yes, the future is bleak. Fortunately, denial is a great tranquilizer. Jeremy Grantham’s GMO firm manages $117 billion. Research at his Grantham Institute for Climate Change tells us Earth can’t feed the 10 billion people predicted in 2050, three billion more than today: “As the population continues to grow, we will be stressed by recurrent shortages of hydrocarbons, metals, water and, especially, fertilizer. Our global agriculture, though, will clearly bear the greatest stresses,” a burden on productivity.

7. Soon we’ll need six planets to survive, even with no new little babies

In “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail of Succeed,” anthropologist Jared Diamond says “what really counts is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment.” Developed nations consume 32 times more resources, dump 32 times more waste than do undeveloped nations. If all 7 billion inhabitants of the planet consumed resources at America’s level, we’d need the resources of six Earths to survive” today!

8. Yes, humans are the new dinosaurs, building our own ‘Jurassic Park’

Writing in American Scholar Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin’s “The Earth Doesn’t Care If You Drive a Hybrid!” Or recycle. Or eat organic food. Or live in a green house powered by solar energy: “Earth didn’t replace the dinosaurs after they died” in the last great species extinction 65 million years ago, she “just moved on, became something different.” Laughlin says “humans have already triggered the sixth great period of species extinction in Earth’s history,” buying gas guzzlers, investing in Big Oil, forever in denial of the widening gap between endless growth and more babies living on a planet of vanishing resources.

9. Paradox: Yes, economic growth is accelerating the death of capitalism

Underlying many dark predictions of 2050 is our narcissistic self-destructive ideology of capitalism. In Foreign Policy, Yale’s Immanuel Wallerstein put the 2008 crash in context: “The Global Economy Won’t Recover, Now or Ever.” Our “capitalist world economy has been in existence for some 500 years … functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved … too far from equilibrium.” Now the only real “political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive.” So what, me worry?

10. Capitalism’s doomsday cycle oblivious of bigger crash than 1929

After the last meltdown, former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson and Peter Boone co-authored “The Doomsday Cycle Turns: Who’s Next?” In one short generation “we have built a financial system that threatens to topple our global economic order.” We let “an unsustainable and crazy doomsday cycle infiltrate our economic system.” But this doomsday “cycle will not run forever,” they warn. “The destructive power of the down cycle will overwhelm the restorative ability of the government, just like it did in 1929-31.” In 2008 “we came remarkably close to another Great Depression. Next time, we may not be so lucky.” Since then Johnson, co-wrote the best-seller: “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”

Fortunately, you’ll never see it coming. Denial really is a wonder-drug tranquilizer. So why worry, lighten up. Focus on the Wall Street banker in Mankoff’s cartoon. Meditate, his bullish guidance will lift your spirits: “While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.” And so it is … for today … until Big Oil stocks start plunging …

Paul B. Farrell is a MarketWatch columnist based in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWFarrell.