Great article!

Its rare to read an article from someone who "gets it". But the author has left out the punch line to this sick, dark humor.



Petroleum that can be accessed using the technological infrastructure currently available to all nations except the United States and Canada is running out fast. The U.S. and Canada are unbelievably lucky because they have the technology, capacity and favorable geology to allow the exploitation of petroleum in different forms for a very long time. And only the United States is wealthy enough to capitalize this kind of effort.

This means two things:

1.) The world is about to enter a depression of cosmic scale with the United States and Canada receiving only a relatively small portion of the brunt of that impact. That will indeed forever change the world more than any other single event in human history.

2.) The first projection I made will happen this way only if the United States and Canada figure out how to, between the two of them, become fully self-sufficient economically. And they need to do it fast because economies in the rest of the world aren't going to be around much longer.

Welcome to the Church of the Painful Truth.

Petroleum is why modern society exists at all. It is telling that the author notes that fuel prices are 3 times higher in Europe and 5 times higher in the Far East (think China). Any casual perusal of Chinese news will reveal that the gas lines the United States experienced in the 1970s on an order of magnitude larger scale are already occurring in China. This is why I keep telling people that China isn't going to be the economic power everyone thinks it will. China and India will be hit particularly hard.

I don't say any of this with glee. This is a horrific forecast that I arrived at only after months of research and I do not see any way this outcome will be avoided. We would have to be totally wrong in our understanding of geology and petroleum for this to change now ... in my opinion.

- kk