The outrage addressed in the August missive was Wall Street banks driving up the price of gas by reckless oil speculation.

“There is no more debate. Excessive speculation is a major reason oil prices have risen so sharply,” he wrote, referring to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data he recently released. “The data reveals Wall Street speculators played a major role in driving up the price of a barrel of oil to $147 in 2008. During the rampant oil speculation, regular unleaded gas in Vermont hit a record $4.09 a gallon, causing financial hardship for many Vermonters.”

“This report clearly shows that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,” he wrote

Bernie Sanders is right.  It’s hard enough to bump up against the fact that the easily recoverable oil is gone, that coaxing anything new out of the ground will be expensive and (even more!) damaging to the environment, but the fact that the same jerks that destroyed the housing market and sent the global economy to the intensive care unit are keeping their boot on our necks and still getting rich off us is more than any of us should be willing to stand.

The same week Sen. Sanders emailed, Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones about the work of University of San Diego economist James Hamilton.  Professor Hamilton notes that 10 of 11 recessions since the end of World War II have been preceded by a rise in oil prices.

All the more reason to resent the speculators, right?  Right, but there’s more to it than that.  For most of those years, we as a society were able to increase oil supply almost at will, by drilling more holes in the places where we know oil to be.  Not so easy any more.

Not only are the giant oil fields beginning to peak, but the new sources of oil – like Alberta’s oil sands or the arctic fields the corporations are so recklessly eager to get their paws on – take years of slow development before they can be turned into gasoline down at the corner station.

Now throw in political instability in places like Libya, Iran and Venezuela and things get even shakier.  Supply begin to run close to demand or there’s rampant speculation in oil futures – or both – the price shoots up, a recession is born, the economy tanks, demand drops, price drops, the economy picks up again, raising the price of oil, sparking another recession, etc. etc.

This all fits under the rubric of “peak oil.”  Peak oil doesn’t just mean the oil’s running out.  It also means that when it gets so difficult and expensive to bring to market – and becomes so vulnerable to the vampire squids of society – then it’s another reminder that we should have listened to Jimmy Carter 34 years ago.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The good thing about beekeeping is you have ready access to bee venom for your arthritic joints. The bad thing is that in winter, when your (and by “your,” I mean “my”) arthritis flares up, the bees are all inside.

Except when the sun shines. Bees won’t defect in the hive, so when you get a warm sunny day like today, the snow around the hives is speckled with yellow bee crap. I went out and thumped a hive and when the girls came out to see what was up, I grabbed one and stung the forefinger that’s been stiff and sore and now I have warm venom coursing through it. First sting of 2011.

It got up to 50 in northwest Vermont today and it’s 17 February. The first week of January, I noted most sub-zero weather in Vermont occurs between 31 December and 15 February. It was unusually warm that first week of January and it’s stayed that way. We did have a week, or almost a week, of sub-zero weather toward the end of January, but that was it. I feel cheated. We’ve had plenty of snow, but then global warming predictions for this area include more precipitation of all kinds.

Following up on another old commentary, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong in September when I wrote, “As far as I can see, the only successful facebook campaign resulted in Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live. I CAN attest that attempts at facebook political organizing have and do waste countless hours that should have been dedicated to real political organizing.”

Shut up, Mark. I still think facebook, as most Americans use it, is a waste of time, but clearly on-line social networks have more than earned their keep in recent weeks by aiding democratic and peaceful rebellion in the Middle East.

I’m still thrilled when I look at the news, seeing what’s happening in Arab nations and Iran, yet I fret for the safety of the brave men and women daring their lives for the sake of their nations’ and their children’s future. It’s great theater from our safe remove, it’s another thing entirely if you don’t know whether you’ll get Tunis or Tehran, Tahrir Square or Tiananmen Square. The impulse, I’m sure is to avoid another generation without hope; the feeling that if you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.

Which leads to the final vegetable at the bottom of this bowl of gumbo: oil. I haven’t written about peak oil lately, because the global recession has driven down demand in recent years, but as my erstwhile colleague Jeremy Leggett points out, peak oil is not a “theory.” It will happen, the only dispute is when. When it does, I hope we have humane democracies in place everywhere, because it won’t be pretty.

In what must be some unholy harmonic convergence of Middle East politics, peak oil and WikiLeaks, the UK Guardian published cables from the American embassy in Saudi Arabia from 2007, privately warning that the Saudis were overstating their oil reserves and that given a growth in demand (bear in mind, this is before the financial meltdown), real trouble could hit the oil markets as early as 2012.

On the other hand, that’s when the Mayan calendar runs out, so why worry?

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The recession. In that May 2008 post, I noted that Goldman Sachs was predicting an oil price of $200/barrel in 2010. But that was May 2008 and by Election Day of that year, the economy had solidly tanked, destroying demand for oil along the way. The price of oil today is around $77/barrel. Even Goldman Sachs gets a money question wrong once in a while.

What happens when (if?) the global recession ends and demand rebounds? Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market that has been the world’s leading authority on business risk for the past 300 years this month predicted “catastrophic consequences” for businesses that fail to adequately prepare for the effects of peak oil.

Lloyd’s and the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs jointly released the report, “Sustainable energy security: strategic risks and opportunities for business.”
The authors’ main points are:
* Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper – failure to do so could be catastrophic
* Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
* China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
* We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
* Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
* Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
* To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
* Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of ‘just-in-time’ models
* Investment in renewable energy and ‘intelligent’ infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

Of course, there are a number of well-educated and well-paid people who fill the columns of business web sites with ridicule for the notion of peak oil. In the same post that mocks peak oil theory as “religion,” the author takes pains to write of “conventional oil.” “Conventional oil”? You know, the black stuff that’s pumped from the ground (or spews of its own pressure into the Gulf of Mexico).

The very fact that peak oil’s critics refer to “conventional oil” means we’re running out of it. The Bradford oil field, the world’s first, for decades provided all the lubricating oil for cars. Only that field – under northwestern Pennsylvania and southwest New York – had the high viscosity oil engines demand and so when it began to play out 20 years ago, synthetic motor oils had to be developed. The same is now true for “conventional oil.” We can no longer rely on the stuff that comes up as oil, we’re going to have to boil it out of tar sands and drill miles below the ocean floor and beneath arctic ice (while it lasts) for “unconventional oil.”

So, in a sense, everyone’s right. Yes, there’s oil out there to be had, at tremendous hassle and expense and damage to the environment. So yes, we can keep on with our oil-based economy and cheap plastic everything and NASCAR as entertainment – at a price. A price that will get higher and higher. A price of money and ecological havoc and blood spilled across the globe.

Yesterday, the body of the 11th Vermonter killed in the oil wars was returned home for burial. How many more?

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Power mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, chain saws and wood chippers – they overlap and blend into an almost-constant symphony of aggravating noise through what would otherwise be the most blissful season of the year.

I’ll give you the chain saws and wood chippers. A city crew was in the neighborhood yesterday, trimming overhanging branches from the roadways and chipping the branches. Trimming branches by hand would take forever and chipping would be impossible. (The chips were taken to our local wood-burning electric plant.)

Gas-powered lawn mowers, on the other hand, seem foolish. I live in a neighborhood of one-eighth acre lots. No one’s going to drop dead of exertion from cutting the grass in a back yard on my street with a human-powered mower.

Worse, the one-cylinder, two-stroke engines in lawn mowers (and weed whackers and leaf blowers) are extraordinarily inefficient. Witness the clouds of blue smoke and oily smell that issue from these engines when they’re fired up. The average lawn mower engine emits four times as much pollution per hour of use than the average automobile. There are no catalytic converters to catch pollutants and no mufflers to catch noise. (The same holds true – in spades – for those other destroyers of summertime peace, personal watercraft.)

The EPA estimates that 17 million gallons of gas are spilled every year while filling lawn equipment. That’s spilled, not used. Seventeen million gallons is one and a half times as much oil as was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. The Humvee parked down at the corner is still as an offensive sight as it ever was, but Lawn Boys and Toros should also start looking that way to us.

Tuesday was a remarkable day in our social history. For the first time, I saw an article in a mainstream media outlet – the Washington Post, in this case – that seriously discussed the possibility that world oil supplies are close to their peak and that demand for oil is outstripping supply.

On one hand, our supply of oil is diminishing, you can argue amongst yourselves how rapidly. On the other hand, we need to drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. As I’ve noted recently (and you can expect to see this over and over) we have eight years to prevent runaway global warming. This is the situation in which we find ourselves and yet, rather than use rakes and brooms, we move leaves around with gas-powered leaf blowers. Rather than trim grass around the edge of the garden with hand clippers (hell, I just let it grow), we use a gas-powered weed whacker.

I don’t want to sound too pious here. Thirty-five years ago, my brother and I cut the grass with a hand-pushed reel mower. We begged our dad for a power mower. (It was cash consciousness, rather than environmental consciousness that dictated his thoughts on the subject.) Finally he gave in and bought a bright green Lawn Boy. Yes, it was easier than the hand mower, but my brother and I soon learned that walking around in circles in the back yard was just as hot and tedious as it had been with the old mower.

A generation and a half later, I still hate cutting the grass. Perhaps if I were more courageous, I’d turn my tiny yard into something like the meadow or forest that was here before the white people showed up and started blasting their engines.

We have eight years left. Eight years in which we need to do things. We had ten years, but we spent the first two making things worse, not better, which means the sacrifices we’ll have to make in the remaining years will have to be more painful. If we continue to insist on burning gas for the simplest of chores that we could do by hand, there’s not much reason for hope.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

“Peak oil” is the term used to describe the situation that will occur (or is occurring) when global demand for oil exceeds global production. It will occur (or is occurring) when either our total oil reserves decline precipitously or when demand rises so fast that new production cannot be brought on line fast enough. We won’t (or didn’t) have the capacity to recognize the onset of peak oil until several years after it has (or had) occurred.

In that 1999 piece, University of Colorado geologist Albert Bartlett predicted (to Congress, no less) that the global oil peak would arrive in 2005. Geologist Ken Deffeyes of Princeton predicted in 2004 that the global oil peak would be reached in mid-December 2005. Were they right? (Looking at this graph, I’d say yes.)

I’ve gotten a number of condescending comments on my peak oil pieces, many from people who should know better. “There’s plenty of oil out there in the tar sands,” is a common refrain. Well, yes, that’s true, but oil from tar sands is 1) wicked expensive to recover 2) wicked slow to recover and – this is most important – 3) will surely cause the destruction of civilization as we know it by accelerating global warming.

So, if you’ve sent me a condescending comment in the past and you read that last statement, find your keyboard. Fire away, but I’m serious. I didn’t write that with any flippancy whatsoever.

We have reached an amazing crossroad in human history. Just at the moment when we have depleted our supply of light, sweet crude oil that flows from the ground under pressure, we have also reached the realization that if we are to survive we must drastically reduce the amount of carbon we allow into the atmosphere.

To prevent catastrophic global warming, we in the United States need to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent and we need to do it now. That means, on one hand, taking a huge amount of responsibility for the choices we make as individuals, but it also means admitting that unilaterally converting to a low-carbon lifestyle will put us – as individuals or even as a nation – at a serious disadvantage in contemporary society and economy. So the other side of the equation must be that we elect leaders who will make extraordinarily unpopular decisions causing economic and social upheaval, but with the resolve that these changes are needed to avoid even more wrenching consequences that are less than a generation away.

Given all that, it would make the best of sense if we would use the end of light, sweet crude as an opportunity to reform our ways, but I doubt we will. If it’s any help, the price of gas is supposed to hit four dollars a gallon in coming weeks and Tuesday analysts at Goldman Sachs predicted $200 per barrel oil within two years.

That’s right on schedule. In August 2005, New York Times columnist John Tierney bet oil investment banker Matthew Simmons over the average daily price of oil in 2010. If the average price is over $200 per barrel, Mr. Simmons wins; if it’s less than $200 per barrel, Mr. Tierney wins. (See this for a recent analysis of the bet.) At the end of his column announcing the bet, Mr. Tierney offered to take on anyone else who wanted to put their money where their gas tank is. The analysts at Goldman Sachs may want a piece of that action.

Even as the price of oil tops $123 per barrel, you don’t see the words “peak oil” in the news very often and not at all in the mainstream media. I Googled “peak oil” this morning and got 3.3 million hits. I ran the term through Google News and got 364 hits. Some of the top hits mocked the notion. (“Peak oil explains lack of UFOs,” says a headline at Salon.)

Maybe peak oil theorists are wrong. Maybe the notion is worthy of derisive laughter. But what’s so funny about continued, heedless combustion of fossil fuels? What’s funny about global warming?

© Mark Floegel, 2008

All of this year’s presidential candidates – the ones that have dropped from the race and the ones still in – promise change.

Our world is changing around us at a rapid rate. Most changes are for the worse. Even if change is for the better, it’s difficult. People don’t like change and they really don’t like rapid change.

What people don’t like about change is uncertainty. Is my job safe? Will we lose everything if someone in my family faces a medical emergency? When will this war end? When will our troops come home? What happens if my town is hit by a major storm? Will I still be able to afford insurance?

Since the major accomplishment of the Bush/Cheney administration has been to deliver this bouquet of uncertainty to each and every American, all the people who want to replace George Bush promise change. In this case, change means a return to peace and prosperity.

Don’t believe them. All the candidates mean well and are sure they are the right person to lead the nation in uncertain times, no doubt. There will be no magic on Inauguration Day next year. The messes Mr. Bush made – the war, the ruin of America’s reputation, the wrecked economy – and the messes he didn’t create but merely exacerbated – global warming, the health care crisis – will not leave us for many years, not in our lifetimes.

Here’s one piece of it. The federal Energy Information Agency reported Monday that for a year – from 1 October 2006 through 30 September 2007 (the latest date for which figures are available), the global demand for oil exceeded supply. (You can see the numbers by clicking here. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Excel spreadsheet entitled “World Oil Balance” in the lower left corner.) In the third quarter of 2007, average demand was one million barrels per day higher than supply.

Since the Oil Age began, we’ve never had a year in which demand has exceeded supply. Our global petroleum system is big enough that there’s sufficient oil “in the pipeline” to keep society running even as we run a consumption deficit, but if the situation continues, the laws of both economics and physics require that hard times are ahead.

Hard times ahead bring to mind hard times past. The most obvious comparison is the early decades of the 20th century, when the planet was ravaged by war, epidemic, famine, revolution and depression.

The citizens of the hard-hit nations of Europe, sickened by the abrupt changes in their lives, opted for certainty, even though the certainty offered was the foolish certainty of tyrants like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. They got their security – some of them did – at a terrible cost and for a very short time.

America, spared the revolutions and famine and less injured by the Great War, found its leader in Franklin Roosevelt. He promised boldness and change – and delivered both – but he did not promise certainty.

In the years of uncertainty since the terrorist attacks of 2001, we have as a nation sought the foolish certainty of a perceived strong leader – “the decider” as he styles himself – and we’ve paid for our foolishness.

If there is sensibility left in the American people, and I think there is, we will this year turn away from the glib promises of those who would trade our freedom for security and deliver neither.

As ashamed as I have been of my nation’s leaders, things could have been worse. Things may become worse yet, if we as citizens fail to take the appropriate action available to us.

The years ahead will lack certainty. They do not have to lack democracy.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

The news is bad once again. (To see the numbers, click here scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Excel icon next to “World Oil Balance.”)

The newest numbers say world oil demand exceeded supply by an average of 800,000 barrels per day in the third quarter of 2007. Revised figures for the second quarter of 2007 indicate that supply exceeded demand by 50,000 bpd. Hope that makes you feel better.

As we ring out the year, the price of gas averages $2.98 per gallon in the US, up 64 cents from a year ago. The price of oil is $96.93 per barrel, up from $55.95 at the end of 2006.

Gold is selling for $840 an ounce, up 32 percent in the last year and the Euro’s worth $1.47, up 11 percent.

Now, here’s a curious thing. If you look at global oil supply and demand numbers on the federal government’s Energy Information Administration’s home page (scroll down, there’s a link to an Excel sheet for “world oil balance” in the lower left corner) you’ll see the new numbers were posted 12 Dec.

I’ve been watching this sheet for a couple years and this is the first time stats have been updated with only the supply side numbers (for the 3rd quarter ‘07) and no demand numbers.

If you look at the world supply/demand numbers by quarter, you’ll see the average daily supply has lagged behind demand for three straight quarters (since 3rd quarter ‘06) and maybe four, once the 3Q07 demand numbers are posted.

I’ve never before seen demand exceed supply for three quarters in a row. I’ll also note world production hit a peak in 3Q06 at a daily average of 85.14 million barrels/day.

The oil companies and the governments tell use there’s plenty of “unconventional oil” out there, so we shouldn’t worry about supply. I agree, sort of. What we’re probably seeing here is the lag time it takes to get all that nasty tar sand and shale oil production up and running.

(I could go on at length about how polluting and greenhouse gassing these sources are, but that’s for another day.)

There’s no doubt in my mind the nations/companies pumping conventional oil have been lying about their reserves and those reserves seem to be declining at a rate more precipitous than most anticipated.

So I’m thinking about three trend lines 1) decline of conventional oil fields, 2) expansion of unconventional fields and 3) demand curve, given the steady appetite of the west and the burgeoning appetite of the east.

We may not see peak oil in our lifetime, but if demand outstrips supply and supply never catches up, it’s the same thing.

Demand destruction is the factor yet to be realized.

Conventional wisdom has long held that the Earth has two trillion barrels of oil. There’s consensus that we’ve drilled, pumped and used about one trillion barrels of oil, which has led some to speculate that we will soon pass over global oil’s “peak” and demand will soon outstrip supply, if it hasn’t already.

The Times article pointed to a 2000 U.S. Geological Survey estimate that put total recoverable oil at 3.3 trillion barrels, which if true, would give us all some breathing room.
An extra trillion barrels, however, is small reason for comfort in light of a 2005 report commissioned by the Department of Energy. “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management” – commonly called “the Hirsch report” after its principle author, Robert Hirsch – predicts it will take 20 years of preparation to avoid an economic crisis caused by peak oil. At current consumption rates, it would take us only another 10 years to pass the peak of a three trillion-barrel supply.

Riding to the rescue is Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the energy consultants the Bush administration and oil companies would like you to believe. He tells us there are actually 4.8 trillion barrels of recoverable oil on Earth, which means we’ve only used a bit more than 20 percent of what we’ve got. Hooray! (A statement that startling deserves to be on the front page of the New York Times. It also deserves a follow-up question, to learn how Mr. Yergin arrived at such a bodacious figure, but the Times remains silent on that point.)

If Mr. Yergin’s right, the oil peak is some 30 or 35 years away and we don’t even have to start making the preparations Mr. Hirsch recommends for another decade or so. When we consider that England has just promised to cut CO2 emission by 60 percent in the next 40 years (and other global warming-aware countries might follow suit), maybe oil consumption will actually decrease and our supply will last even longer. Wow! Whaddya think? Maybe we should all buy new Hummers.

Or not. One thing everyone agrees on is that we won’t know we’ve past the oil peak until after its happened, because every nation that has oil has reason to lie about how much it has. Predictions, even from bright people like Mr. Yergin, involve substantial guesswork. The numbers you don’t have to guess are the actual barrels brought to market and used.

The federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) tracks global oil production and consumption. (See below for information on where to find these numbers.) Their charts show both demand and supply have been rising in recent years.

Oil supplies increased by an average of 2.61 million barrels per day in 2003. In 2004, supplies increased by 3.43 million barrels per day and in 2005, oil supplies increased by 1.56 million barrels per day.

The final 2006 figures were released the same day as the Times article; the oil supply increased by an average of 30,000 barrels per day. That’s a small increase, far less than one would expect after reading the Times’s description of renewed pumping from old wells or Daniel Yergin’s 4.8 billion-barrel prediction.

In fact, if you look closely at the spreadsheet, you’ll see that due to Hurricane Katrina, U.S oil production dropped by a million barrels per day in the fourth quarter of 2005. If not for Katrina, 2006 production might have been lower than 2005.

The EIA has yet to print consumption numbers for 2006, so we don’t know if demand exceeded supply, but I think skepticism is still called for; a visit to the Hummer dealer is not.

© Mark Floegel, 2007

(EIA oil data: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_glance/petroleum.html. Scroll to the bottom of the page and under the heading “International Data” click on the Excel spread sheet entitled: “World Oil Balance.”)

All the topics above are important; some are more urgent than others. Around this time last year, I wrote that Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted world crude oil production would peak on 24 November 2005 (he later amended that prediction to 16 December 2005).

The global oil peak, like the U.S. oil peak, which was reached in the early 1970s, will not be noticed immediately, Mr. Deffeyes and other peak oil adherents say. It will only be two or three years after the peak that what has transpired will become clear. Because oil is pumped in so many places and because so oil-producing nations and oil companies have so many reasons for being less than forthright, it can take two or three years before the undeniable fact of declining production becomes clear to all.

It’s not clear yet. Reuters news service reported at the end of October a speech by Matthew Simmons, another peak oil theory proponent. Mr. Simmons noted that according to data by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), the world supply of crude oil was 84.35 million barrels of oil per day in the fourth quarter of 2005, but by the second quarter of 2006, production had fallen to 83.98 million bpd. Those numbers are in line with Mr. Deffeyes’s prediction.

I sat on those numbers for a bit, to see if the trend would continue in the third quarter of 2006. It didn’t. Third quarter 2006 oil production averaged 84.98 million bpd, according to EIA.

If you want to geek out and dive into the specifics, you’ll see that OPEC producers and the nations of the former USSR hiked their production in the third quarter of 2006, but elsewhere, there are declines across the board.

Production, of course, is only one half of the peak oil equation. The other half is demand. Even if oil production continues to creep upward (as well it might, since high oil prices justify the recovery of hard-to-get-at oil, like the oil trapped in Canadian tar sands), if the demand for oil rises above supply, we have an energy crisis on our hands.

The EIA site lists global demand in 2002 at 78.08 million bpd, 2003 – 79.74 million bpd, 2004 – 82.45 million bpd, 2005 – 84.02 million bpd. Demand in the first two quarters of 2006 (the latest data available) averaged 84.15 million bpd.

All those numbers boil down to this: right now, oil production is about 830,000 barrels ahead of demand each day. That’s not a huge margin for error and the differential is widened by three facts – 1) global economies have slowed considerably in the last six months, 2) a calm hurricane season knocked no Gulf of Mexico production off line and 3) the so-far unusually mild winter in the northern hemisphere has kept demand lower than normal.

I can imagine some readers, skeptical of peak oil, might be saying at this point. “Well, he was wrong, but at least he has the courage to write about it.” Ken Deffeyes was wrong, a year ago, to predict that world oil production would not rise any higher than the average for the fourth quarter of 2005.

I hope it doesn’t spoil any gloating, but I’m not ready to call this a decided question. A graph on the EIA site tracks the price of gas over the past two years; gas in December 2006 costs more than it did in December 2005, even though we were still reeling from Katrina then and we supposedly have a steady supply now. Looking ahead, we see oil exporter Nigeria exploding, literally, with unrest. Iraq’s oil production will not get out from beneath its civil war for the foreseeable future and Iran is facing more sanctions over its nuclear program. The dictator of Turkmenistan is dead and the future may be uncertain in that oil and gas rich nation and Vladimir Putin is acting more like his old KGB self every week.

Will peak oil be passed off as misguided worrying by alarmists or are those people the few bold enough to say what they see with clear eyes? We’ll be much closer to the answer in 2007.

Happy New Year.

EIA data:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_glance/petroleum.html

© Mark Floegel, 2006