The Oil Drum pointed me to this article at the Seeking Alpha blog. The original Barrons article he references might be found here at the bottom of the page. It was there today. If you are a Barrons subscriber you can probably get the article at their site.
Point is this - the Chinese are making hay while the sun shines and locking up fossil fuel reserves all over the place. We, on the other hand, seem to be locked into a "drill, baby, drill" mentality, which will not serve us well in the long term, no matter how much drilling we finally do. Michael Fitzsimmons, the author of the article at Seeking Alpha, believes natural gas will be around a long time and we should be moving to that as a transportation fuel. I am not convinced he is right about that, but I do agree that the Chinese are well ahead of us in getting resources lined up. And do remember, they are one of our biggest creditors, and thus have the basis to stand up and raise the issue about changing the world's reserve currency, currently the dollar, to something else.
They got us by the shorties baby, and trust me this didn't start on Obama's watch. Those of us following peak oil know better than that.
3 comments:
I wrote about the Chinese resource grab on my own blog a few weeks ago. Are there only twenty or so people out there who notice that China is buying rights to as much of the remaining oil supply as they can get? Is this known only to the blogosphere and not to our policy makers?
And Russia is making arrangements with Cuba to drill for oil in Cuban waters, which our own oil companies can't touch because of the idiotic Cuban trade embargo.
This country is still in a trance, and I fear that the only thing that will shake us out of it is stratospheric gasoline prices and suddenly unreliable supplies, with the disruption that will result. By then, of course, it will be too late to do the things we could have done to assure access to remaining supplies and to make better use of what we have.
Be careful what you wish for. Come summer and next year we may see stratospheric prices, or something approaching that level.
I'm not wishing for it, Kheris, because it will make life almost as difficult for me as anyone else.
Oil will probably hit $70 a barrel by the end of this summer, and it's already over $50. Prices are so volatile on the "bumpy plateau" that it could swiftly ratchet back to last summer's levels on a very modest uptick in demand.
Our leaders have no excuse for not knowing, but no one wants to bring up the issue during this difficult economic time, even though the two issues are linked. We turned to asset inflation, debt creation, and monetary manipulation in order to "grow" the economy in the 00s, because we were up against the limits of growth as oil neared peak, and Britain once more became a net importer as the North Sea fields began to deplete steeply.
Our leaders knew, yet promoted the very behaviors and policies we most need to change, and they know now, and are still pandering tot the desire to pretend that it's still 1990.
Post a Comment