Just in time for Saint John the Baptist Day tomorrow ~ One of my favorite Peak Oil "Cassandra's" is Jim Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and of a usually good and insightful, albeit afflicted with a profane title (eff bomb warning) weekly political/environmental/social rant Clusterf*ck Nation. (Note to readers: once you get past the title you are mostly safe from having gratuitous profanity inflicted upon you.)
Now if we could just get Kunstler converted so we could benefit from his wisdom in light of a Catholic worldview, that would really be something. His rants are so good. St. John the Baptist, pray for us ~ we need rangy men with wild hair, dressed in skins, munching on wild honey dipped grasshoppers, dunking us in the Jordan river and bellowing REPENT in our faces.
QUOTE The telling moment last week was Robert Hirsch's appearance on the CNBC morning "Squawkbox" financial show in which he proposed the probability of $500-a-barrel oil within "a three-to-five-year time-frame." Squawkhead Becky Quick was clearly nonplussed by the stolid Mr. Hirsch, author of a (then)-startling 2005 US Dept of Energy report (since referred to as the Hirsch Report and buried by the Secretary of Energy) that warned of dire effects on the American way of life as the Peak Oil predicament gained traction. Perhaps more reality-challenged was the uber-idiot Larry Kudlow on CNBC's night-time money show, who kept repeating the mantra "drill, drill drill" when presented with signs that something other than "oil speculators" was driving up the price and creating global scarcity. These idiots always return to the shibboleth that "there's plenty of oil out there." What they don't get is that even while the world is enjoying the all time peak of production (somewhere around 85-million barrels-a-day), that same world is demanding at least 86-million barrels -- so even though there's more oil than ever, there's not enough. And the gap is only bound to get bigger. The difference between what's available and what's demanded is being felt by poor countries and poor people in richer countries. Third world nations lacking their own oil are simply dropping out of the bidding, and the lower classes in the US are having to choose between buying gasoline and velveeta. The floods in the corn belt will surely aggravate the problem here in the USA. Lunch breaks may soon be a thing of the past for WalMart Associates. Maybe they'll just play video games on their cell phones in the parking lot to allay their hunger. UNQUOTE
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