DougM

Does Crude's Price Reflect Reality?

You haven't considered the non-OPEC supply, which is increasingly strained. Moreover, the marginal additional non-OPEC barrels (tar sands, deep water sites) are costly to produce - this supply would dry up overnight if prices went down to $20. Finally, the market is forward-looking; the resource is finite and the population of the world is still rising.

Contango Scares USO, DBO Investors

I think the latter - you'll lose a few bucks every month even if prices just stay flat, because you'll have negative roll yield. Your money will go straight into the pockets of people doing the storage arbitrage (buying at spot one month while selling you next month's contract at a higher price than it costs to store the oil).

The Obama/McCain Energy Charade: Nothing But Empty Ideas

Don't forget Obama also opposes expansion of nuclear power. Where's the power for all those electric cars going to come from, coal? Obama's selling the same old energy fantasy regarding wind and solar. Germany's been down that road, and now they're looking at turning back to - wait for it - coal, because their green groups just can't stand nuclear. How's that for new ideas?

A Tale of Two Industries

Oil companies are going to see falling production because their reserves are falling. They're locked out of the best places to find oil world-wide, having been shoved out of Venezuela most recently. The most likely spots here in the US are closed to them by government policy. Just having money isn't enough - they also need opportunities. If this continues, expect more and more share buybacks to return money to shareholders.

As for the blame game, no one from a major oil company put a gun to the heads of millions of idiots and told them to buy a gas-guzzler. GM and Ford were apparently too short-sighted to understand that oil's a finite resource and that betting their businesses on producing gas-guzzling SUVs was a losing gamble. Are we going to extend the new socialism to business now, punshing success and rewarding failure? I hope not.

Peak Oil: The Next 5 Years

Yes I should have mentioned that there is such a shocking amount of waste currently baked into the system that we could withstand a fairly large drop in primary energy production through conservation alone. I have to disagree that conservation is the best long run solution. I think it's the best short run solution, but we'll eventually reach the point of diminishing returns. At that point we'll have to have ramped up nukes, solar, etc. - we can't conserve our way to zero without mass starvation and a collapse of technology.

Peak Oil: The Next 5 Years

Uranium production was down because prices crashed when all the material from recycling weapons hit the market. That's reversed now, and uranium reserves have grown considerably. The current once-through process in the US is extremely wasteful. Other nuclear-powered countries like France and Japan reprocess the waste to recover and reuse unburnt fuel. With breeder technology, we can run our entire civlization on nukes for 1000s of years by burning the otherwise-unfissionabl... U238 and Thorium.

Coal won't last forever but it will last a long time. We could run our entire civilization on coal alone for 80 years - since our nuclear, hydro, oil, and gas reserves won't suddenly go to zero, I think we can count on coal to last a very long time. We can run planes on coal - coal gassification can be used to produce hydrogen, syngas, or even liquid fuels. The airforce recently started testing jet engines that run on a coal-derived fuel.

Solar energy is an enormous resource we've barely tapped. An area about 1/7 the size of Nevada could power our entire electric grid on solar energy alone. There are unsolved problems of storing power for later use, as well as cost issues, but the reality is that all of humanity's current 400 quads of annual energy use are less than 1% of the solar energy that runs through the earth every year. I haven't even mentioned wind (a form of solar power) or geothermal energy.

In short, expensive energy yes, possible adverse environmental consequences if coal is used yes, collapse of civilization due to exhaustion of energy resources no.