Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

..Amateurs should not fool around with issues of Peak

Oil. They confuse their readers with rah-rah bromides, and will cause people to hurt themselves. These type of party-hardy cheerleaders idealize the workings of the so-called “free market” (dollar-denominated, so how “free” can it be?), while ignoring the inexorable march of resource depletion and the irreversible decline in future amounts of available liquid fuels. They confuse a temporary market retreat with the equivalent of the Russians defeating the Germans at Stalingrad, and mark an otherwise minor trading event as the start of the end of the Great War. But of Peak Oil, allow me to paraphrase Churchill after El Alamein, “This is not the end, nor the beginning of the end. This is not even the end of the beginning.”

..Let me put it another way. Within the next 20 years we need to find the petroleum or other energy-equivalent of another Saudi Arabia, plus another Kuwait, plus another Iran, plus another Russia. And this is just to keep even with the present requirement to run the global economy at current energy prices, not allowing for future increases in demand. And this also does not even get into the increasing global demand for natural gas, the numbers for which are worse than those for the oil supply.

The Daily Reckoning