Well, it’s official, reality and the mainstream media have finally begun to have something to do with each other. Once the New York Times admits that the peak is here, everyone else should follow, even the lunatic right if you give them some extra time to digest this new reality, and to find a way to blame this on the Clintons.

To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

“This is the market signaling there is a problem,” said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, “that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies.”

Today’s tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that’s only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades.
[…]
“The country has been living beyond its means,” said Vaclav Smil, a prominent energy expert at the University of Manitoba. “The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.”

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Well, finally Iran gets to laugh at the United States. Hopefully Israel will not get its wish for an invasion of Iran this year, and I think by next year this question will not really be very important anymore. And who knows, maybe the next US president might actually realize that’s it’s good policy to create strong international relations based on a degree of trust and good faith. Just a weird thought, excuse me if it’s off topic…

“The oil price of $115 a barrel in today’s global markets is a deceiving figure. Oil is a strategic commodity that needs to discover its real value,” the Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
[…]
Ahmadinejad accused Western industrialized nations of “selfishness” in their quest for cheaper oil.

“When they get hold of oil, they assume that oil is a free commodity and belongs to them and has wrongly been placed in other territories. … This is the spirit of selfishness and arrogance,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.
[…]
A weaker dollar makes commodities such as oil less attractive to investors as a hedge against inflation, and it makes oil more expensive to investors overseas. Analysts believe the weaker dollar is the primary reason oil has soared this year. The effect tends to reverse when the greenback gains ground.
[..]
Iran has stopped using the U.S. dollar in its oil transactions with the outside world, switching to currencies such as euro.

“The dollar is not money any longer but a handful of paper distributed in the world without commodity support,” the Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Will the USA respond by asking its tired and over-reached military forces to attack Iran? Keep in mind what happened in 2000 when Iraq started to sell oil in Euros. Stay tuned, pick your favorite quality news source and you’ll know soon enough…

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If you haven’t checked out Jim Rogers, ex partner of George Soros, here’s some good interview videos of him. The first one is from March 2007.

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These news items are extremely important to understand, because this is a clear indicator that the current group of industry supported politicians will not be the ones who finally begin to lead the world to any meaningful solution to the energy supply issue, or probably any other major issues facing us for that matter, especially climate change.

In fact, I am having stronger and stronger doubts that any US or British politician in the current political climate will lead anywhere that points away from enabling industry to try to squeeze out a few more quarters of profits before the inevitable happens.

This is not what real leadship looks like, but it is what we deserve for having glued our collective minds to the television screens for decades while politicians and industry have formed increasingly incestuous bonds, to a degree not seen since Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

Britain calls for OPEC to increase production:

Oil prices jumped to a new peak near $114 a barrel on Tuesday amid lingering supply worries and weakness in the U.S. dollar, deepening concern in world consumer nations that a spike in energy costs could cause severe economic damage.

Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, on Tuesday called on OPEC members to boost production to counter rapidly rising oil prices, which have shot up 80 percent since a year ago, adding his voice to similar requests from the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.

“We are not producing enough oil … and we can take collective action to persuade OPEC and others to get the oil price down,” Brown said in an interview on Sky Television.

Not a single word about the destruction of the US dollar by the US government/banking industry. Not a single word about the need to conserve more and more as global supplies begin to peak while demand is rising.

USA and Britain blame OPEC for high oil prices

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