At $140/barrel, going back to stripper wells to extract the 70% of oil that remains becomes much more interesting.

By definition, though, if it's only economical to extract while the market price is $140+ / barrel, that won't reduce the price on the market.

You cite new production from existing fields as adding to the bucket, but completely forget new production from new fields.

For example, where do the oil-sands fit within your peak oil philosophy? Also, where do new technologies in old fields fit? At $140/barrel, going back to stripper wells to extract the 70% of oil that remains becomes much more interesting.

Where have all these moron prognosticators been for the past 5 to 10 years? These trends have been building the entire time...populations just don't fucking explode over night. Give me a break. If the problems today were known in the past decade, which they were, the price of a barrel of oil would have been adjusting all along. If anyone can express an opinion with any confidence that this spike "just happened" because of this bizarre "oh, there are so many people & so many cars" are idiots. It is bullshit. All these asshole "speculators" now run the show.

Actually, doesn't the evidence you cite mean exactly that the speculators don't run the show? If they did, they would have moved the prices up many years earlier, when, as you state, the current situation was becoming clear to anyone paying attention.

Instead, the price remained low, right up until the demand actually started exceeding the supply -- at which point it jumped up a lot, due to the short-term inelasticity of the demand.

I do believe that speculation is a significant part of today's price, though, and that it's also the reason for the high day-to-day/week-to-week volatility we've been seeing. But, given that speculators eventually have to sell to somebody who is actually going to use the oil, I can't see them as the main reason for this kind of multi-year sustained price runup.

I also support the recent bill that was introduced (or proposed?) to attempt to root out the speculators, because that would let us all see where the real demand/supply ratio is -- and let the U.S. and world population know that this really is a demand/supply issue (i.e. permanent), not just a market spasm (i.e. temporary).

Pretty good movie about that Russian mass murdering child molester.....not that there's anything wrong with that.....

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112681/

An event like the oil price disaster of the past 2 years has a much more sinister driver & that is the government failure to prepare for it. There were analysts, much like those for 9/11 or the Luxury War, who were able to see this developing many years advance, but were threatened to cherry pick or change observable evidence thereby setting the table that is causing unknowable damage to the economy for the foreseeable future.

This is a disaster perpetrated by the U.S. Government. Now we get weak excuses like, "those Asians, just so many, they consume so much!" There are no checks or balances on oil speculation & it is now a runaway train.

If you like high gas prices, then you'll love McCain. My guess is that his threats to "Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" have added more to the price of gas than a Federal gas tax holiday would remove. Maybe many times as much.

(Sorry, no, not the mantle.)

Wait, you mean ... there aren't gigatons of bacteria silently producing more oil for us by the millions of barrels as we speak?

Why didn't anyone say so?

Where have all these moron prognosticators been for the past 5 to 10 years?

Saying the same thing they are now. Where were you?

If the problems today were known in the past decade ... the price of a barrel of oil would have been adjusting all along.

It was — downward, by means of subsidy, and a certain amount of chicanery on the part of OPEC. But it wasn't very subtle chicanery — the house of Saud has been rather publicly preparing for this for at least 20 years.

Most Bric countries are building storage, and the US is considering adding storage. The cost of above ground storage can add a couple dollars to each barrel of oil. Note that even as oil prices were rising the Bush administration was adding oil to the SPR. Sometimes these purchases take on a desperate quality, which only acerbates the problem.

10 years ago, "these moron prognosticators," like myself, were warning that peak oil was coming. Why? Because discoveries had already been declining for 3 decades, and because, by the '90s, we had gained the ability to drill all the way down to the continental rise in the ocean basins of the world. That's the edge of the world, as far as sedimentary cover is concerned, which is where oil comes from. (Sorry, no, not the mantle.) So there were to be no great new discoveries reversing that old trend.

Why did no one listen? Oil was cheap by the late '90s. And for decades, oil prices had cycled: oil supplies tighten, prices rise, more fields become economical, exploration for new fields is stimulated, and in a few years, they start producing. And then there's an oil glut, and prices fall, starting a new cycle. That's what some people still expect.

But in the late '90s/early 2000s, several non-OPEC producers reached their peak production and started declining: Norway, Mexico, the UK, etc. Furthermore, it looks like the only OPEC nation that can increase production is Saudi Arabia, meaning the rest are probably at peak. So supply tightened. Throw in a couple of supply disruptions--thank Bush and his bloody Luxury War--and prices not only rise, they start becoming volatile, driving speculation in the futures markets. Further wars over oil-producing areas (cough-Iran-cough) will only make things worse.

Oil prices have risen since 2002. The new discoveries from increased exploration have not made up the difference in the midst of rising demand. Though speculation is certainly causing a great deal of noise in oil prices, it is not producing a six-year "spike." This is the alarm bell. Whatever we do from here, "more of the same" is simply not an option.