Wall Street Succumbs to Peak Oil

Peak oil be here, folks. We use 30% more oil per capita than the next largest world user. That's huge. One way the US can continue maintaining a stable supply is to fake evidence that a weak country with a lot of undeveloped oil is developing weapons of mass destruction and unilaterally attack it, against the advice of the other large oil using countries and trading partners. If we did this, and did end up controlling the weak country's oil production and sales, we would take "first dibbies" on purchase of the oil output. Plus we still pump 32% of our own oil needs puts us in pretty fair shape for a long time.

The other biggest world users, the EU and soon China, however, would rightly feel endangered by this and try to cause us to fairly share the world's remaining oil. They could begin by negotiating with us to continue to let all oil to be sold to all comers at the same price. One fairness issues is how to solve the great differences between our vastly higher per capita use of oil resulting in the US, with 4% of the world's population, using over 25% of the world's daily oil consumption. Another issue to negotiate is that the EU has very high fleet mileage standards and taxes on oil relative to us.

If negotiations didn't work, the EU and China might begin programs of cashing in the trillions of dollars of US debt they hold, crushing the dollar, pushing the US into a depression, ending our world wide adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan, closing our overseas military bases, and pushing the price of oil bought in dollars to several times the price in euros.

We sit out here in the Western Hemisphere with 300 million people, while the EU has 425 million people and a larger GDP than the US. China has 1.4 billion people and a skyrocketing GDP. They both sit on the Eurasian land mass where the majority of world economic action takes place. If we still wouldn't share remaining oil equitably, they might militarily attack and defeat us and then force us both to tax oil and lay on mpg standards in parity with the rest of the world, plus pay them reparations for the costs of their military action. I think I'll vote for high US mpg and gas taxes now, plus no more overseas adventures and full cooperation with the EU and China in finding equitable solutions to sharing remaining world resources.

TINA of CA 11:15AM May 28, 2008