Fifty-four of the top 65 oil-producing countries have declining production rates.

I get a real laugh out of people saying that oil will go down in price, as it is ludicrous to even think so, particularly since supply is dropping, per a CommodityOnline.com report that “54 of the top 65 oil-producing countries have declining production rates“.
And demand for oil will be going up, as I gather from Doug Low, writing in The Oil Drum: Europe, who extrapolates, “In the next 11 years, we will consume more than we have in our entire history. So in order to double the size of our economy, which we will do at 6 percent growth in 11 years, we will require more resources than we have required during our entire history, including electricity.“
And all of that takes oil. Lots of it. Lots and lots and lots of it, Atimes.com reported.
And it is not only oil that is going up in price, but everything is going up, as an article in the Financial Times quotes David Mackay of Kellogg, the breakfast cereal conglomerate, that inflation is really making them wince, as, “There’s really nothing that’s gone down: wheat, edible oils, corn, packaging, the price of oil and diesel--everything is up anywhere between 19 percent and 30 percent.“
This is due to, as Martin Hutchinson implies in a recent The Bear’s Lair column, the Federal Reserve and the federal government (except Ron Paul) being a bunch of morons. As he writes, “The final report card can now be written on the fiscal management of the Bush administration, the primarily Republican Congresses since 2001 and the Federal Reserve chairmen of the period. One’s only regret in writing it is that no grade lower than F has been discovered.“
And part of that egregious mismanagement is that not only are prices rising in a terrible inflation, thanks to the damnable Federal Reserve creating so much excess money and credit, but you soon won’t even have a job to pay the higher prices! Anthony Cherniawski of the Practical Investor newsletter has taken a look at the recent employment report, and notes that, surprisingly, “Omitted from the report was the CES Birth/Death Model, which normally puts a positive spin on the employment report. Not this time! According to this model, all sectors of the economy suffered losses, with the grand total 378,000 jobs lost in January.“
And while we are here, let’s look at the actual employment numbers, which show that the number of people employed is 146.248 million, while last year at this time the number of employed was 145.915 million, a gain of a lousy 333,000 jobs in a year.
And the unemployed are jobless for longer periods, too, as the average duration of unemployment went up to 17.5 weeks, up 6 percent from the 16.5 weeks duration a year ago!
And as to oil, we read of Gary Dorsch, of Global Money Trends Newsletter, citing two famous economists, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, who said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. As the government increases the rate at which it prints money, the result is too much money chasing too few goods and services. Higher wages don’t cause inflation, and the whopping oil price increases between 1973 and 1980 didn’t cause the stagflation - a stagnant economy with rising inflation. Rather, the oil price hikes were the form inflation took.“
And if you want to see the form inflation took from the perspective of the Japanese, the Agora Financial’s 5-Minute Forecast reports, “Japan is the world’s largest holder of US Treasuries. Of the country’s $973 billion in reserves, $580 billion are US bonds. That investment, versus the value of the yen, is down about 13 percent over the past year alone.“
The dollar going down in purchasing power, which is the same as an increase in prices, has cost them 13 percent in one year, all thanks to the despicable Federal Reserve creating all that money and credit, so that the government could borrow it and spend it, which went into the hands of Americans, which ended up in the hands of the Japanese, thanks to the trade deficit.
Richard Daughty

The oil shocks of the 1970s produced a flurry of attention to alternative sources of energy, but it faded once prices dropped in the mid-1980s. Now, with oil prices again high and climate change moving up the list of public concerns, interest in alternative energy is once again at fever pitch.
Is history about to repeat itself?
Not likely, according to a leading energy consulting firm. In its recent report, the firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, concludes that multiple factors will continue pushing the world toward greater use of alternative energy sources like sun and wind power, regardless of what happens to oil prices.
“The focus today on clean energy is not a bubble or passing phenomenon,“ the report says. “Unconventional clean energy is now poised to cross the divide and move from the fringes of the energy sector to the mainstream.“
What makes today different from the 1970s is growing apprehension about global warming is a threat to political security and the environment, according to the report. That is pushing governments to demand, and subsidise, greater use of alternative energy, Financialexpress.com reported.
“Climate change and putting a price on carbon will change the dynamics of the energy marketplace,“ said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and a leading historian on the oil industry. He noted that with the Chinese and Indian economies growing rapidly, “you need renewables as part of the solution to meet this astonishing demand growth.“
The report notes that renewable fuels will remain small compared with conventional fuels for many more years to come, and their rate of adoption will be determined by the intersection of government policies, economic growth rates and technological breakthroughs.
But the report projects that rising private and public investment in clean energy--including biofuels like ethanol; renewable power, including wind, geothermal and solar generation; nuclear energy; and techniques to capture and store carbon emissions--could surpass $7 trillion by 2030. In 2007, roughly $125 billion was invested in such energy sources worldwide, said Robert LaCount, lead author of the report. That was about 20 percent more than the year before.
Other analysts say there is no guarantee that energy in the future will be cleaner, because renewable energy is effectively in a race with other unconventional sources, like liquefied coal, Canadian oil sands and oil shale, which emit higher amounts of carbon dioxide than conventional hydrocarbons. While several major oil companies have joined smaller firms in investing in wind, geothermal and solar and other energy sources, they are investing far more money at the moment in oil sands.
Environmentalists at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pembina Institute have estimated that at least 20 percent of the pollution reductions coming from the new vehicle fuel Economy standards law, which Congress passed in 2007, would be negated by the additional production and refining of oil sands in Canada by 2020.
“Producing more low-carbon fuels is all well and good, but their benefits can be washed out if we don’t tackle the threat of high-carbon fuels like oil sands at the same time,“ said Deron Lovaas, an analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Development of renewable energy sources has taken significant leaps. The American wind industry, for example, expanded its generating capacity 45 percent last year, generating enough power for 1.5 million households. Accounting for 30 percent of the new American power-production capacity last year, wind reached 1 percent of the country’s electricity supply, according to data from the American Wind Energy Association.
A recent study by Emerging Energy Research, another Cambridge consulting firm, estimated that as much as $65 billion would be invested in additional wind power from 2007 to 2015, producing a compound annual growth rate of 15.7 percent.
The Cambridge Energy Research Associates study projects that installed capacity of geothermal power should increase by 50% or more in the next five years as the number of countries using it doubles, to more than 40.
The study also noted serious limitations for clean energy development. It estimated that “meaningful deployment“ of technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions is at least two decades away. It acknowledged the challenges for nuclear power “with regard to policy, capital costs, waste management--and public opinion.“

About 12 percent of vehicles sold in Sweden in 2007 were E85 models, versus an expected 6 percent in the United States.

Sweden has embraced ethanol unlike any other country outside Brazil, and the Nordic nation’s example may help the United States in its quest to reduce its dependence on foreign oil.
How committed is Sweden, a small country with just 4.2 million cars?
“Sweden has made a major commitment to ethanol,“ Michael Wood, the US ambassador to Sweden and a Flint native, said in a recent interview in Detroit, Detnews.com reported.
Michigan officials, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, are looking to Sweden for guidance and see the push for alternative fuels there and the transformation in various industries as something that could be emulated here. The governor made a trip to Sweden last year and has praised the country’s commitment to alternative energy. She said Michigan must follow suit and is planning a summit of Michigan and Swedish energy leaders later this year in Michigan.
“To understand the connection between renewable energy and jobs, just look at Sweden--a country with striking resemblances to our state: the same size population, similar geography with two-thirds of their land covered by forests, a strong automotive sector,“ Granholm said.
“Sweden set high goals for their use of renewable energy. The result they created over 2,000 businesses and 400,000 jobs in their renewable energy sector--400,000 jobs.“
The United States has about 121 million drivers and just more than 1,200 E85 pumps, mostly in the Midwest. By contrast, Sweden has 5 million drivers but more than 1,000 ethanol pumps, in part because of a 2006 Swedish law that requires stations to have an alternative fuel pump.
At the Detroit auto show last month, GM announced it had invested in Warrenville, Ill., cellulosic research firm Coskata Inc. In December, 80 percent of the vehicles sold by GM’s Saab unit were flex-fuel capable, said Christer Nilsson, a Saab spokesman in Sweden.
“The approach has been to coordinate all actors to start the journey at the same time, marching together,“ Nilsson said. “The cars are of no need if there are no pumps and vice versa.“
About 12 percent of vehicles sold in Sweden in 2007 were E85 models, versus an expected 6 percent in the United States.
Sweden has also taken financial steps to encourage E85 vehicles that the United States hasn’t. Those vehicles qualify for a 20 percent tax break and many local governments give flex-fuel vehicles free parking. Those benefits have been extended to gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles in some U.S. cities, but not to the 6 million flex-fuel vehicles on the roads today.
Last March, the Swedish government also gave flex-fuel vehicle buyers a $1,500 rebate and there is no tax on E85 at the pump.
Granholm has called for the elimination of Michigan’s $0.12-cent per gallon tax on E85.
Some automakers in Sweden have pitched in, too. Volvo gives customers a rebate when they trade in a gasoline-vehicle for a flex-fuel one in Sweden.
Further evidence of the commitment is the pressure by some political parties in Sweden to ban any non-environmentally friendly car from being sold after 2015.
The rest of Europe is starting to embrace ethanol, though outside of Sweden there are only 375 E85 pumps. Scottish whisky distilleries want to make ethanol out of waste material. Last year Great Britain opened its first ethanol plant from sugar beets, while France wants 7 percent of all its fuel to come from ethanol by 2010.
The United States has taken a different approach to getting ethanol to the pumps. The energy bill boosting fuel economy standards that became law in December requires the nation use 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, including 21 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol, but it doesn’t regulate how to get there.
Americans spend $1 billion a day to consume about 388 million gallons of gasoline. In 2006, Americans used 5.4 billion gallons of ethanol. Under the new law, the US must use 9 billion gallons of ethanol in 2008.
The quick ramp up of ethanol use has drawn concerns from one of the energy bill’s main authors, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., chairman of the Senate energy and natural resources committee. “Early year biofuel requirements could be too aggressive,“ he said.
Since the vast majority of ethanol in the United States comes from corn, diverting more corn to ethanol has led to its price more than doubling.
“If we cannot produce enough ethanol and biodiesel to meet these aggressive mandates, while maintaining food and fuel prices that consumers can afford, the biofuel industry will be tarnished,“ Bingaman said last week. “The cost of failure is high.“