When serious information is communicated, people quickly filter it into good/bad news, and the worst news goes immediately to a recycle bin called: Doom and Gloom. And the purveyors of these facts are called Doomsayers and 'Negative'. C'mon people, a bit of critical thinking...think you can do that? It's the least you can do.
I have predicted on this website $100 oil for about 2 years before it happened. I've suggested investing in gold when gold was still $300. (Invest in coal now too). Stock exchanges worldwide are at an extreme level of volatility. This will get worse, with some massive downward corrections. To be clear, by July this year, $90 oil will be a distant memory; two digit oil will have a 'feel-good' factor about it. By July oil will be anywhere between $105 and $120. What people simply don't realise is that none of this is temporary. It's not a temporary blip, temporary problems, temporary shutdowns, temporary crisis. It's something else, and all human beings will be swept into the torrent. It will be chaotic downward shift.
Economists will calmly tell you that high oil prices will dampen demand, and thus prices will not rise any more. Wrong. Oil right now is cheap. Wait until exporters decide to keep the oil for themselves, to run their own countries with their remaining reserves. The voracious race to buy cars and build houses and malls and to run suburbia and the world (with all its festivals and world cups) is not concerned with oil prices, they're concerned with making money. To make money they have an immediate individual focus on meeting deadlines, finishing projects. There is no global view. There is no community consciousness. Bad weather? Who cares. Howz my bottom line? Demand is already powering far, far in advance of the supply curve...even if just the demand for motor vehicles.
Right now oil is cheap. Did I say that already? I'm repeating it here again because some aren't getting the obvious. Oil is cheap. We drive out the stuff to go to gym or a convenience store 3km away. In time, we will be accused of squandering...we'll be indicted by our children for our reckless greed. What were you doing? Our excuse will be that 'everyone was doing it', that it was a lifestyle, that we were distracted, and people were contradicting each other. If that's going to be your excuse, read this website. It's clear. The signal is consistent.
Peak Everything really means that stock exchanges will never again surpass peaks reached roundabout now/recently. There will be small crashes and corrections, and then more carnage, with an overall downward bloodletting. Stagflation is a scenario with slow economic growth (soon to become a permament recession) and relatively high unemployment, coupled with high prices. The reason we face this is because of low capacity in virtually every sector worldwide. The financial system that we have based all the wealth of the world will collapse. It always was going to, what with the system of interest rates and it's inflationary effect. On a more basic level, the collapse we face is due to the everyday demands of a large human population on Earth, where each human organism expects to have their own car, house and appliances, consumes goods with exdpensive packaging transported sometimes thousands of miles by container ships.
The WWF estimates that we currently consume the equivalent of 1.4 planets. If that doesn't make sense, the fossil fuels we're using are 'stored energy'. It's like using up a credit card when you have no money in the bank. You just can't keep on doing this. Take away our fuel inheritance and we're short of half a planet for 7 billion voracious predators/consumers to run our shopping malls, suburbia and everything else.
Power supply is a problem worldwide, from Pakistan to Britian, from China to South Africa. High food prices are affecting everyone, not only because of higher fuel price inputs, but because of climate change and pollution as well. The poor will suffer, and increase in number. Crime and unemployment will increase.
In the future we will need to become farmers, and become a community again. Computers and the internet can keep our communication and inefficiencies down. We will live more locally and the world will become a lot larger. Superstores will become extinct. Airlines will fall out of the sky. Trains will become big, so too streetcars. You will be restricted at the market to what can be grown or made locally. Life will be about what is essential, addressing fairly basic our needs on a large scale, not so much about convenience or what we 'want'
But the emphasis should be on this kindset: a permanent decline. A permament contraction. A strong likelihood of war, and a nuclear exchange as resource depletion begins to bite on a planetwide scale. This is not the distant future, it's now. It's happening.
Do you expect petrol prices to come down again after a few months? Then clearly you still have not heard or understood a word being spoken or written. You have no idea how serious our collective situation. Wake up!
Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
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