Interview with Financial Sense July 8, 2011
I appeared on the Financial Sense with Jim Puplava program today, in a segment they titled “2012 Energy Crisis Now Looking Likely.” We discussed the futility of releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and why our government officials and business leaders are failing to come to grips with the loss of spare oil production capacity and consequent oil price spikes that should develop in 2012, followed by the long-term decline in global oil production. (I did not actually predict oil over $150 a barrel, as they indicated on their site, but I do think we’ll hit a maximum pain tolerance point that will kill demand in the OECD, and that price point will likely be lower than the $147 peak we saw in 2008.) My long-term thesis for this century is that fossil fuel supply will decline to almost nothing over the next 90 years, resulting in what I’m calling The Great Contraction–a century of economic shrinkage, and a long process of relocalization (the reversal of globalization). But our leaders are utterly failing to plan for it. I concluded that “there is no intelligent life here.” But on the bright side, solar installations are setting new records in California.
You can download the show (32 mins) here: RealPlayer | WinAmp | Windows Media | MP3
See also: Seven Paths to our Energy Future
Thank you: Your honesty and insight into our energy dilemna is important to me. I wish you would post more often.
Comment by Jb — July 8, 2011 @ 1:59 pm
Honesty is a very dangerous and career-limiting strategy. But I try to do it anyway and I’m glad you appreciate it. Cheers.
Comment by Chris — July 8, 2011 @ 2:10 pm
That was your best Puplava interview to date. I live in a town full of elites, and they are just as ignorant and in denial of peak oil and its consequences as is Joe Sixpack. If they can’t or won’t grasp the coming economic contraction, how can they possibly be persuaded of the future famine and die-off?
Comment by Chris II — July 8, 2011 @ 4:40 pm
Precisely. Hence, I believe that bottom-up, local solutions will be the way forward, not top-down strategies, and most of the progress will be made by people in less than wealthy communities who act out of self-preservation. I wrote several pieces along those lines at the beginning of 2010:
The Future of the Southwest: Localization and Carrying Capacity
Resistance, Resilience, and Rebellion
The Renewable Power Rebellion
Comment by Chris — July 8, 2011 @ 6:18 pm
Chris,
I agree with poster #3. This interview was great. Jim let you run with answers and your answers were solid without redundancy, and covered a lot of ground. I wish I could do that, speak as well as write. No one covers the datasets in an understandable way as well as you do, and I think your day is coming soon, particularly if we are starting to see the consequences as soon as next year. My, but won’t the political and economic tweaking be flying with little effect then?
Unlike Poster #3, I don’t run with the elites, so I wouldn’t know about them, but Joe Blow knows that something is very wrong and almost without knowing why is making some moves that will help insulate him a bit from the Great Contraction. If he is educated to the inevitable he will be even better at adapting. My guess would be that Mr. Elite Capitalist is going to get the biggest surprise when he realizes that the end of growth isn’t a temporary blip but a chronic condition as far as anyone can see, and that Joe Blow isn’t going down without a fight.
It all fits in with solutions perkolating up from the Joe Blows of this world and those who stand in solidarity with them. Too many folks have been played for fools for too long, and the gift wrapping is falling off the literal crap piles of poisons and pollution, from the foods we eat, to how we get around, to what we are taught and how we live in some semblance of comfort, health and safety.
Bring on the paradym shift and let’s see who best deals with it and who doesn’t.
Comment by Ron Shook — July 11, 2011 @ 3:12 pm