The View from Hubbert's Peak By Mike Davis
Angry truckers celebrated this May Day by blocking freeways in Los Angeles and container terminals in Oakland and Stockton. With diesel fuel prices in California soaring to record levels in recent weeks, the earnings of independent container-haulers have dropped below the poverty line. Lacking the power of big trucking companies to pass rising fuel costs onto customers, the port drivers -- many of them immigrants from Mexico -- have had little choice but to share some of their pain with the public.
In one action, abandoned big rigs blocked the morning commute just south of downtown Los Angeles on Interstate 5, making tens of thousands of motorists temporary hostages of the fuel crisis. As one exasperated commuter complained to a radio station, "This is really the end of the world."
Perhaps it is. As Venezuela's energy minister Rafael Ramirez told the Financial Times on May 24, "The history of cheap oil may have ended."
Although real (inflation-adjusted) fuel prices are still well below their 1981 maximum, an ever-growing chorus of voices, ranging from former UK environment minister Michael Meacher to National Geographic magazine, echo Ramirez. We will soon arrive, they claim, at the summit of "Hubbert's peak."
M. King Hubbert was a celebrated oil geologist who in 1956 correctly prophesized that U.S. petroleum production would peak in the early 1970s, then irreversibly decline. In 1974 he likewise predicted that world oil fields would achieve their maximum output in 2000; a figure later revised by his acolytes to somewhere between 2006 and 2010.
If the curve of global oil production is indeed near the point of descent, as these experts believe, it has epochal implications for the world economy. More expensive oil will undercut China's energy-intensive boom, return OECD countries to the bad old days of stagflation, and accelerate the environmentally destructive exploitation of low-grade oil tars and shales.
Most of all, it will devastate the economies of oil-importing third-world countries. Poor farmers will be unable to purchase petroleum-based artificial fertilizers just as poor urban-dwellers will be unable to afford bus fares. (Already, rising oil prices have brought chronic blackouts to cities throughout the globe's southern hemisphere.)
The only certain beneficiaries of this coming economic chaos will be the big five oil corporations and their corrupt partners: the Nigerian generals, Saudi princes, Russian kleptocrats, and their ilk. Crude oil truly will become black gold.
full: http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1458 --
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