Brace Yourself for Oil Shock Future. It Won't Be Pretty

Click here to access article by Chris Martenson from Peak Prosperity (behind a paywall) via Russia Insider. (My comments were amended at 4 Pm Seattle time.)

I think that this is a very important study of future oil/gas supply and its various effects on our societies. I have been favorably impressed with this author in the past. Most recently I encountered him in the interview he conducted with geoscientist David Hughes and posted at the Post Carbon Institute. Also, the implications of his analysis correspond closely with those of Gail Tverberg who is a widely respected expert on fossil fuels, and whose writings I have followed for quite some time.

The graph at the left illustrates the effect on prices caused by diminishing fossil fuel supplies together with higher costs of extraction. He sees extreme volatility in prices as central banks attempt to cope with higher costs of extraction.



You see, the Empire's main central bank, the Federal Reserve, is owned by private banks which, in turn, are owned by the richest (and the most powerful) of the ruling One Percent. The capitalist system under which the economy is run requires economic growth to feed them their interest payments on money they have created out of thin air, backed mostly by the Empire's control of oil resources (and the threat of various forms of violence both overt and covert), and loaned to oil companies and capitalist investors. This is the way Martenson explains it:

I don't know when, but there will come a moment when the world realizes that the trillions and trillions of dollars worth of paper claims in the form of currency, bonds, and derivatives only have value in relation to the actual things they can buy.

At this magic moment in time, the scales will fall off the world's eyes and it will realize that oil is the king of economic energy sources. And that less oil means less real wealth for all those claims to go chase.

Without the economic growth that oil provides, you cannot make a reasonable case for constantly expanding the debt loads of a society.

The logic of constantly expanding debts only works with the assumption of perpetual future growth.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I am not supporting his argument that the current fall in oil prices is solely due to capitalist economic factors. I think there is a confluence of factors which led to this decision by Empire directors to cause this current fall in oil prices, and the timing of this was due overwhelmingly to geopolitical reasons: to damage Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan economies. And there are other factors such as the opportunity for major oil companies to buy up many smaller companies at bargain prices.