Unfortunately, let us not forget about the Iraq war. Iraq, as we all know, shares a border with Saudi Arabia. Iraq is a wild card, just as it has been for the last three years, that has not *truly* entered into play (w/r/t the spot prices). It is amusing how this is almost never mentioned in the media--the standard rule is to complain about *why* BushCo invaded, but not state the obvious. They lied, they lied! But who knows why! I find it amazing, that for some reason it is seen as unreasonable to state that the true reason we're there. They had to lie because people are to stupid to understand the real reasons even if they had it explained to them (trust me, I've tried--as I'm sure many of you have too....) Instead it is because of "freedom", "democracy", "terrorism" and stopping the "insurgents who supported the evil dictator Saddam Hussein". Bullshit. as arch-liberals love to say "Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with 'the evil dictator Saddam Hussein'" in the early 1980s during the tanker war (we had recently lost our puppet govt in Iran when the Islamic theocracy within that country was able to capitalize on angry sentiment towards to the western-backed Shah. The revolution at the end of the misery-index chart-poppin Carter Administration put the Reaganites in the position of having to support "evil dictator Saddam". I think is says something about American denial that the whole *public* conversation about Iraq is completely missing any mention of geopolitical energy strategic positioning. This is hysterical as the whole thing is so plainly about energy reserves and access to them. Saddam was essentially a secular, power hungry, pan-arab nationalist with a twist of nazism. We had no problem supporting him until his grubby power hungry hands went invaded Kuwait without approval of the Imperial masters. Of course, the only reasons anyone would want to invade kuwait is because of oil... And, umm, the only reason anyone would want to invade Iraq is... Of course, anyone with a functioning frontal lobe can lucidly see that the ex-oil executives running our country by proxy through actually existing oil company executives are no dolts when it comes to the vagaries of oil production.

Ditto your point about the "technology", which eventually only increases the rate of diminishing returns. Your ironic statement can actually be seen comparatively also in the way that "efficency" has *seemingly* improved in the last 30 years, when in fact taking into account increased automobile size, Jevons P. in electricity usage and the breakdown of our ability to continue increasing efficency at historical levels all spells difficulty (analogous to what is soon going to happen to microprocessors--when transistors can get any smaller...) People also forget that ever since much of our heavy manufacturing has been sent off into foreign markets, where labor arbitrage is is the rule of thumb--that now the energy that is used and consumed to make imported products is not counted in US energy consumption statistics. Anyway, sorry to ramble, just thought I'd state the obvious =]

The fact of the matter is that geology, as interesting as a discussion of it can be here at TOD, will probably not be what throws a wrench in the global economy. More likely, it will be geopolitical moves coupled with bands of groups that try to disrupt networks a la John Robb's global guerilla hypothesis. This is already happening at a non-lethal systems level, and could easily overflow outside of it's goblet, into a non-local and spreading phenomena.