GASOLINE TO HIT $20 A GALLON IN THE FUTURE?

 

 

By Frosty Wooldridge
March 7, 2011
NewsWithViews.com

[Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this article are solely those of Frosty Wolldridge and not necessary the opinion of NWV, its staff or other writers.]

"The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime....so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous population...that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age. It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it." James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency

Who can we blame for $4.00 a gallon? Answer: every last one of us cotton pickin’ American gas guzzling 8-cylinder SUV drivers, trucks, trains, boats and planes! We burn 20 million barrels a day in the United States. The world’s humans burn 84 million barrels daily. That’s 29.9 billion barrels of oil annually worldwide! Whopping carbon footprint! Hey! Did you think a finite resource like ‘endless oil’ could go on forever? That’s like sucking on an ‘endless milkshake’ straw at the local diner! It eventually runs dry and you suck on air.

Are you upset? You gotta’ be kiddin’ me! The “Hubbert Curve” told us that “Peak Oil” would hit the United States in 1970 when geologist M.King Hubbert predicted a drop from nine million barrels to three million barrels daily. It came to pass!

Peak Everything: Facing a Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg tells us we face rapidly declining supplies of metals, water, oil, coal, minerals and most other resources we rape the Earth to acquire for our rapacious human activities. Are we preparing with such simple plans like 10 cent deposit/return laws on all metals, plastics and glass. Not a chance!

If you think $4.00 a gallon today hits your wallet, think again. Chris Steiner wrote $20 Per Gallon, which predicts with deadly accuracy a steady rise of prices from $5.00 to $10.00 to ultimately $20.00 per gallon before mid-century. Why? Answer: we may have only burned 50 percent of the Earth’s oil supplies, but it’s farther down, harder to get at and more expensive to extract. Thus, costs rise!

Experts knew it would happen, but since 1970, we just kept burning oil like there was no tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be today! How’s that big Ram truck with eight powerful cylinders doing for you at $4.00 a gallon. Peak Oil will prove a game-changer!

We failed to incorporate conservation in any form. We failed to plan. We failed ourselves and future generations.

“As we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we have reached now to a renewable energy resource economy, which we do this century, will the “civil” part of civilization survive? As we both know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the amount of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a Faustian bargain—selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the moment, but sooner or later the price has to be paid.” Walter Youngquist, energy

“An immutable fact of expensive gasoline: Americans will find someone to blame,” said Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal. “We can expect in the coming months to hear many sober analysts attempt to explain the complex reasons for rising oil prices: inflation, Middle East tremors, growing demand. Expect, too, for all those reasons to vanish behind what most Americans will see as the far more obvious cause: President Obama's regulatory assault on domestic oil and gas production.”

Obama, Congress and the American people dance around the fact that we failed to plan. We face an unsustainable “Peak Oil” consumption conundrum. We created a “Faustian Bargain” with the inevitable “Hobson’s Choice” for the final answer. That ‘answer’ forces us to take only two choices left to us: pick door number 1 and you get to walk over a cliff with no parachute; pick door number 2 and you fall into quicksand with no lifeguard.

In January 2008, candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." Steven Chu, now Secretary of Energy, told this newspaper in the same year: "Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Currently, $8.00 a gallon in UK!

In his book The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, he predicted that China would burn 98 million barrels of oil daily by 2030. They stick six million new cars on their highways every year—so they will reach that burn rate in 19 years.

However, the planet will be coughing up only empty ‘stuff’ like you do at the end of your ‘endless milkshake’ when you suck on ‘nothing left’.

What can we do?

• Massive change-over to two and four cylinder cars
• Massive push for electric and solar cars
• Massive push for wind and solar energy
• Massive push conservation on all fronts
• Massive push for walking centric cities
• Massive push for mass transit
• Massive push for bicycles in cities
• Massive push to suspend all immigration into America
• None of it will happen if you stand by complaining without taking action
• Action at www.NumbersUSA.org

As the USA adds 3.1 million people annually via relentless immigration, to rise from 312 million to 400 million by 2035—more demand, less oil—higher prices and lucky to have any oil at all! Finally, we need a massive push to suspend all immigration into the United States to stop creating a nasty future for ourselves and our children. We cannot keep adding human numbers if we expect to survive the 21st century.

Listen to Frosty Wooldridge on Wednesdays as he interviews top national leaders on his radio show "Connecting the Dots" at www.themicroeffect.com at 6:00 PM Mountain Time. Adjust tuning in to your time zone.

� 2011 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved