SCREW YOU! A Game Of Peak Oil

How do kids say it today? *headdesk* *facepalm*

You read things like this and that's the only rational reaction.

Forbes, a magazine for the one percent if there ever was one (its motto is actually "the capitalist tool"; I will refrain from comment) has published a piece basically stating that Peak Oil is a myth and we can all relax. To support this ludicrous assertion, they note that fields containing up to a billion barrels of oil equivalent are still being found, most recently in East Africa.
A billion barrels, eh? That's a whole hell of a lot. It'd supply the world for almost an entire month. Then what? On to the next month, I guess.

Are we really at a point where we're bragging about the prospect of living month to month?

And nothing is said about the fact that the majority of these new finds are unconventional. Oh, it's mentioned, but in a positive context, as if to say 'look how innovative we are'. Innovative? More like desperate.


Unconventional is what Canada's oil sands are. I won't get into the environmental rape and pillage necessary to extract value out of unconventional oil sources--hey, my government doesn't give a rat's ass, so why should I? Instead I'll frame it as a simple exercise in economics: something the capitalist tools of the world (think they) understand.

Unconventional sources require much higher energy inputs to extract an equivalent volume of energy than do the oil fields of the past 150 years. In other words: these fields cost more to develop. Lots more. All for a measly billion barrels of oil, assuming the estimates are correct. They usually aren't. A browse of this site will show you that estimates are sometimes off by as much as an order of magnitude.

In short, we have exhausted the 'easy' oil...now we're increasingly looking at the stuff that's harder to get at. Expect more of this. Also this.

The People Who Matter (motto: If You Have To Ask, You Don't)  will read this without thinking about it and speculate the price of oil ever higher. That's really at the root of the 'great game' the article refers to. The game goes by many different names, but they all boil down to SCREW YOU.

SCREW YOU is a game for ages 50 and up. You don't have to be white to play it, but as Ron Leech would say, it's an advantage. To play the game, you need to have developed over time the sense that the world economy is itself a game and the colossal arrogance to believe you have the right to play it.  So much fun to use living human beings as pawns.
The idea here is deceptively simple. Your goal is to bid the price of oil as high as you possibly can...without crashing the world economy. A crash would be disastrous: after all, the game pieces (who already have developed the sense that somebody is playing with them) might actually figure out it's you, and then no more foie gras and champagne for you. How horrible.
As I was saying, you speculate the oil price as high as you can. Here's the neat part. Everyone knows the law of supply and demand: if you suddenly twig the world to new supply, say by means of a Forbes article, you can reasonably expect the price to fall. But you can counteract that by inventing a whole bunch of reasons out of thin air to keep the price high. (You won't admit the price remains high because the oil is actually running out: that's a heresy, would cause a panic and a crash, and no more foie gras and champagne for you.)
It's fun to invent these reasons. Refining is at capacity. No word on when more refineries will be built--for heaven's sake, don't do that, it'd drop the price. The summer driving season (or the winter heating season, or the spring springing or fall falling season) is coming. Hurricanes are always a good bet--you'd set one loose in the Gulf right now if you could, except your third home is just outside Naples and those buggers are so unpredictable.
And then there's the old fallback, "political instability". That's why you own the government: to promote political instability wherever you can. That's where the fun really gets going, because the stakes are so high and the game so much more difficult. There are so many factors to balance off and pawns to exchange and I must say, ol' chap, one mis-step and it's that ghastly interruption in the supply of foie gras and champagne again.

Oh, the fun of it all. You can play until you die and will the pieces to your progeny. And if you play really well, the people you're screwing won't ever be able to figure out you were playing at all...