China's mercantile approach only seems to be a poor return on investment when viewed with a mindset stuck on a belief in growing production. When production is flat or declining, locking down the resource sooner rather than later may very well result in a better return on investment than other choices.

Sullivan appears to be locked into the "global market" mindset, which may not survive the peaking of global oil supplies.

Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett

Greyzone,

You may be interested in this China population pyramid for your blog, looks a bit like a snake eating a large meal. :

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/data/pop/pop_6.htm pop china pyramid

BTW, your link to that plastic Sargasso Sea seems to be NF

That is in no way any kind of advantage. Quite the opposite.

The mindfully.org server appears to be down currently. I have no idea if this is a permanent change or a temporary one. You can also read about the "Eastern Garbage Patch" at Greenpeace or other sites. Simply do a Google search on the following terms - "plastic" "Pacific" "tropical" "gyre" "Texas" - and you will get multiple articles on the topic.

Please note that the "Eastern Garbage Patch" is not unique. There are other ocean gyres that are exhibiting similar trash problems, just not at the scale of an entire area as large as Texas... at least not yet.

Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett

Good point--I think it's telling that our "best minds" on the topic can only come to the conclusion that this is a poor investment. The failure to view this from within the paradigm of Peak Oil shows our own failures.