Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gas prices finally headed down last week. But the pattern over the last 30 years suggests that this is bad news for anyone who believes that Americans, the world’s biggest oil consumers, can ever curb their energy consumption.
The biggest news in the world at the moment however is also the most suppressed, and it is actually quite frightening. It’s suppressed because it completely obliterates all the ludicrous reasons we’ve been fed about why we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because once it becomes self-evident the global stock markets will panic and crash.
OPEC expects world oil demand to rise by some 2 million barrels per day in the third quarter from a seasonal second quarter low, as consumption growth hits a seven-year high, the cartel said Thursday.
Concern that the European Commission could gain control of Britain’s North Sea oil resurfaced last night.
IN THE short run, it is good news that the price of a barrel of crude oil has fallen below US$40 (S$69). In the long run, however, this is not good news. In fact, it may be terrible news.
Robert Bryce on the Texas-Washington-international crony network. “If you believe, as I do, that worldwide oil production has reached its peak, then they’ve set up a global showdown.”
Luanda – The Angolan government yesterday unveiled a $370 million (R2.4 billion) plan to develop infrastructure in the oil-rich Cabinda enclave, in a bid to win over a region that has long pushed for self-determination.
Australia will have to import oil by the end of this decade as we move into a world where prices are inevitably going to be higher.
Kazakhstan announced on Friday that it planned to build two oil terminals in Iran as it ramps up a lucrative oil-swap export arrangement that has been criticised for lack of transparency.
The recent sabotage of Iraq’s oil pipelines has raised fresh concerns about production capacity and room for maneuver in case of a crisis amid firm global oil demand.
We need both cheap money and cheap energy, in particular oil and its derivatives. The problem is that we can print our own money in any quantity the Fed deems sufficient to keep the economy humming along. But we can only provide 40 percent of the oil we must have from domestic sources.
The head of one of the world’s biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him “really very worried for the planet”.
