Terry Blanton wrote:
> September futures of light sweet crude hit $46.60 today. What does the > smart money know that we don't?
Maybe it knows what I just wrote in an essay:
It takes roughly 13,000 kcal of fossil fuel energy, mainly oil, to produce a 140 g serving of beef, which has only 375 kcal of food energy. In other words, to make a quarter-pound hamburger, it takes 1.3 kg of oil (about a half gallon). [Pimentel and Pimentel, p. 193]
This can't go on, folks. And it won't. I do not know whether Kenneth Deffeyes is smart money, but he is a smart cookie, and he now predicts, with comical precision, that oil production will peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. That specific date is probably a joke -- his book is very witty -- but the message is serious. Give or take a year or two I am sure he is right. See:
http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/current-events.html
Sometime in the next few years two things are bound to happen: 1. Oil production will peak and began to decline inexorably; and 2. The Japanese population will peak, and began to decline for the next 10 years anyway, perhaps longer. The Japanese can start making babies again any time they want, and they could reverse the trend in as little as 10 years, but nothing will bring back the oil. If we knew how to find more, we would have found it decades ago.
- Jed
