Jamaican in Africa

Oil to Retest $40/Barrel by Year-End?

A war between the generations is what seems to be coming. As resources approach exhaustion, and there without a corresponding fall in demand then competition will drive up the price and force consumers to substitue the goods and services they desire for the ones that they can afford.
Boomers are carrying too much debt and the cathostrophic fall in American household wealth is creating a fiscal crisis for them. The WWII generation survived the great depression, defeated the Nazis and out maneuvered the Comminists after they were too old to fight them on the battlefield. That generation also realized that the boomers were idealists, who were quick to point out every American short-coming while they idolized dictators, petty revolutionaries and petty tyrants all around the world.
Boomers ignored international atrocities and demonstrated little concern about national priorities like national defense, maintaining the nation's manufacturing capacity, protecting the borders and the crime and decay that burdened our cities and forced working families to flee. Baby boomers amassed tremendous debt in order to buy the newest BMW and McMansion rather than exercise restraint creating an unsustainable situation and the current economic downturn is giving them a lesson.
Fuel prices will rise even if boomers desire clean energy, because solar and wind power will not in the near term meet their demand to power their MacMansions, heat their hot tubs or fill the gas tanks of the three cars that occupy their gararges. As the fall in their wealth becomes more apparent, the reality will force them to work longer because they have not demonstrated any willingness to curtail their demand for consumer goods that drive the demand for comodities like petroleum, metals and chemicals.
Maybe, in the short term there may be a fall in demand for oil (as unemployment grows, GDP stagnates and real per capita purchasing power falls) but in the long term, the baby boomers will continue to demand the things that they have always demanded thereby forcing up the prices of natural resorces like oil. The climb in oil prices back to $140 per barrel is inevitable, it is only a matter of time, unless the baby boomers change their habits.