moi:
> it's interesting that the article misses the fact that even if these > countries don't invest in exploration for and exploitation of possible > new oil reserves, those reserves will still exist.
Yoshie wrote:
That is not a political issue.
Heck, I wasn't talking about "political issues" in the quote above, but economic ones. Isn't economics allowed on pen-l anymore? (what does the "e" in pen-l stand for?)
Oil companies know that reserves exist out in the world, unexplored and untapped. What they are concerned about is whether they are made available to them and on what terms.
so much is obvious, but Marvin was talking about costs/benefits to oil-producing countries, which also count in the political-economic mix (along with the interests of the oil companies). Yoshie's comment here seems to be nothing but a _non sequitur_.
The same goes for the ruling classes and power elites of the empire in general: they know that unexplored and untapped reserves exist, but how much of them will be consumed by the peoples of the oil-producer nations, and how much of them will get exported, and on what terms, is a concern for them.
it's not the "oil consumed by the peoples of the oil-producer nations" that's politically relevant. It's the oil _revenues_ consumed by those peoples. Obviously, those two are connected, but the revenues are what the fuss is about. moi:
> There's a fundamental problem with the view that these countries are > failing to subsidize the oil-consuming countries, at least in the > short run. It assumes that high oil prices are resulting from the > behavior of those nasty nationalizers. It's more likely, I think, that > the high prices are instead the result of high demand for oil > (Chinese, Indian growth, etc.) and a lot of temporary falls in supply > (Iraq, Nigeria, etc.) and the normally inelastic nature of both > supply and demand [*].
Yoshie:
While the rates of growth in China, India, etc. will eventually slow down, the secular trends in most nations, even the Gulf states, are rising fossil fuel consumption everywhere.
it depends on one's time-frame. In the near future, there's likely to be a recession in the US (directly due to the over-indebtedness of consumers), and contrary to some, that will have a major effect on the world market, depressing it and petrol demand. It also depends on other things: successful efforts to avoid global warming, which involves increasing the efficiency of oil use, would slow the demand for oil. It's true that the best we can do in forecasting the future is to extrapolate current trends (after figuring out which trends are most important and most likely to persist in the future). But extrapolations often fail; they are especially poor in the prediction of recessions. For example, if we see either a recession-driven or an increased-efficiency-driven fall in the demand for oil (or a surge in supply), that would cause a steep fall in the price of oil (akin to what happened in 1986), due to the aforementioned (but seemingly ignored) short-term price inelasticity of both supply and demand. This would screw Putin and Chavez and other oil-producing countries. The oil producers of the world may thank those nasty nationalizers for cutting back on oil exploration (if indeed they have done so), because those cut-backs would moderate the fall in oil prices in the future. The slower exploitation of those reserves would slow any long-term rise in oil prices, too, assuming that there are indeed naturally-limited supplies of oil.
As many parts of the South have hardly begun to provide electricity for all, and their better-off consumers are just now beginning to acquire automobiles and the like en masse, the trends are likely to continue, provided capitalism keeps running.
this confuses use-value and exchange-value. It's true that "many parts of the South have hardly begun to provide electricity at all," but the problem is that they don't have the purchasing power or the political power to turn those needs into market demands. As for the elites, their prosperity and automobile demand isn't just dependent on capitalism "running" but also its running _well_. China, and its "better-off consumers," are still very dependent on the world market. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
