"Drill baby drill" all you want, at best it slightly will slow the decline
The post referred to (click graph) develops the entire current world oil production and economic situation. Here's the money quote:
The reason we need a growing economy for the debt system to work is the fact that a person can borrow from tomorrow, only if tomorrow is better than today. (This is especially the case if loans require the payment of interest.) But if tomorrow is worse than today, borrowing from the future doesn't work. Even if tomorrow is the same as today, the system doesn't work, if loans need to be paid back with interest.It's a grim assessment--borrowing against the future is no longer possible because limit on essential liquid fuel energy constrains the growth required to pay those debts.
The problem is that the economy cannot grow unless oil production is truly rising. This lack of growth in world oil production since 2005 is what is causing the debt collapse we are now seeing. This debt collapse is in turn giving rise to the demand destruction we are seeing currently. Since oil production cannot rise in the future, it seems to me that we are going to see a continuing unwind of the credit bubble that was made possible by rising oil production. Without credit, people will be unable to buy cars and houses. Businesses will be unable to finance new investment, and we will see greater and greater demand destruction.
Yikes. See also HERE and HERE for more. The first link (by the same author ref. above) lists countries with their year-to-year change in oil production rate. Very few are in the "growing" camp.
The second is a penetrating analysis on futures markets and quantification of finite resources with fiat money. This gets straight to the heart of the matter about why the bubble-inflation style of finance capitalism U.S. elites insist on preserving has as its Achilles Heel the erosion of cheap sources of energy resource commodities. It's very useful for understanding the long-term global economic context.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. --President Jimmy Carter, July 1979
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