Jim Kunstler put this one on he non-blog website so you will have to scroll down to "July 16, 2007", but it will be worth it for the depression that only Jim can induce.

Psychotic Break
by Jim Kunstler

A curious phenomenon worth attention from pathologists in the financial press is the now nearly complete de-coupling of the finance sector from the salient ominous trend in the oil sector: the fast-developing permanent oil export shock. By that I mean a severe decline in export ability by those nations currently supplying the US, Europe, China, and Japan -- an export decline that will far exceed actual production decline rates in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, the North Sea, Mexico, and Iran. This story or scenario developed by Jeffrey Brown and statisticians at The Oil Drum.com, is pretty easy to understand: production declines in these nations will combine with greater internal oil consumption to severely curtail exports in a shockingly brief time frame. The populations of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran are growing; car sales in Russia are up 50 percent this year; even Norway is using more of its own oil every year. These nations are consuming about 25 percent of their total liquids (regular crude plus natural gas liquids and condensates). Basically, the picture shows that net exports from these nations will run to zero in nine years. And they will be low enough within five years to throw the importing nations into complete economic paralysis. The situation is even darker for the US because our number three source of imports, Mexico, is showing production declines far worse than the other exporting nations, suggesting not only that the US will receive no oil from Mexico in only two or three years, but also that the Mexican economy is likely to collapse and plunge that nation into political turmoil -- just what we need along our 2000-mile border. It's against this background that the stock market melt-up of 2007 presents a virtually psychotic picture of disconnection from reality, because the oil story says, essentially, that the global economy as we know it can't possibly continue to operate, and that therefore investment in its future operations is certain to go up in a vapor.

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Refined Excuses

Been wondering why you’re paying $3.00 a gallon — or more — lately? The main reason, according to Jad Mouawad of the New York Times, is because there’s a bottleneck in US refining capacity, which means that the least little disruption causes higher prices:

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Peak Tech?
by Jim Kunstler

Go anywhere in America, among any class of people -- from the Nascar morons to the Ivy League -- and one expectation is pretty universal: that technology will only bring us more wonders and miracles, and it will certainly save-the-day where our energy problems are concerned. This would seem natural for people living in an age when a simple cassette SONY Walkman is superceded by an 80-gigabyte iPod in one generation. But what if this assumption is off? What if peak technology occurs roughly in the same wave as peak energy? Of course, another nearly universal expectation is that we will go through an orderly transition between the end of the oil fiesta and whatever comes next -- implying, naturally, that some new sovereign energy resource is out there in destiny's green room, getting prepped up, waiting to be sent on-stage. The confusion about this, induced by strenuous wishing, is such that most people expect the next energy resource to consist of technology itself. This has been the heart of my beef with the rosy future crowd. Energy and technology are not the same thing, not interchangeable or substitutable. If you run out of one (energy), you can't just plug in the other (technology). I certainly believe other energy resources exist besides oil and methane gas, but I maintain that we will be grossly disappointed by what they can do for us, given what we are currently running in society. Nor am I categorically against the idea of using these other things: solar, wind, bio-fuels, what-have-you. I can even be persuaded on nuclear with its many hazards, if that's the only way to keep the lights on. But all of these things will not preclude the extreme necessity to make severe changes in our manner of daily living -- and to do so rather quickly.

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