The Oil Drum

Agric - I assume your projected depression is caused by reduced global oil production and shockingly high prices for energy, right?  Question:  when you project a "depression" do you factor into your projection the reduction in demand for global oil that the early stages of a depression (known as a "recession") will cause, and thus the reduced prices for oil during the recession that will begin to allow growth to re-occur and the recession to ease or even end?   And do you factor in the effects on changing energy use patterns that the intial shock of substantially higher oil prices will have on all societies?  By that I mean the accelerated change in the fleet toward higher efficiency, the reduction in purely optional travel (of which there is a large amount), the construction of more mass transit, the substitution of rail for truck, the increasingly local production of goods, the accelleration in development of nuclear, solar, wind, ethanol and coal gassification.

The only aspect of PO theory that I find unconvincing is the doomsday scenarious.  The reason I find them unconvincing is that they seem to exclude the impacts of price on demand and supply for crude, substitute energy sources, and human activities.   Not that there will not be painful adjustment periods.  But the end of civilization is not in the cards in my view.

In fact, when you consider the impacts on different economies, I think there is a good argument that China and India, particularly China, will pay much higher prices for the impact of PO than western economies because the high prices for transport will serve to move manufacturing back toward the source of demand, thus creating many more jobs in the developed economies and fewer in the now cheaper labor markets that are so far away.  Plus, the very energy wastefulness of developed economies, particularly the US, will make it far easier for them to cut back on their energy use.  This tendency will also mitigate the financial impact.

Net, net, I expect US stocks to tank very big time at some point, probably within the next five years, and for there to be an initial period of substantial unemployment.  But I think that will lead to a later stage of growth for our economy accompanied by vast adjustments to high energy costs.