The Oil Drum

I'm just pointing out how silly we at TOD can be sometimes.

TOD is great in that it attracts a myriad of people with different ides that all share some common ground 'peak oil'. It's really entertaining to see the various opinions (expressed as facts) that get thrown around. Yet the common denominator of all the 'doomerbation' talks centers on one thing: The USA will be screwed.

Yet magically, places like China will succeed.

The last time I checked, China can not even feed their own population anymore. One of the most common 'facts' expressed here is that in a PO world, the world will not be able to feed its people and 4+ billion will die. Yet this magically won't affect any of those countries that we deem 'better' than the USA.

The same goes for various economies. China and the USA are dependent upon each other. If one goes down, so does the other, as there isn't a consumer bloc large enough to 'absorb' the loss of 300 million happy consumers. Chinas own population doesn't make enough for them to sustain their current production, much less thrive. This also ignores the fact that we repeatedly state that economic growth is directly tied to oil consumption (this trend has vanished in the past 30 years), yet these same countries are expected to outperform the fat old USA, despite this dwindling resource.

Now this isn't an attack on you, BrianT. I'm merely expressing my bemusement at the whole doomer-train.

10.21 trillion at purchasing power parity ("PPP"), which is of course an estimate. But oil is priced in actual currency, so China doesn't (yet) outbid others for oil, which may be why they use so much coal. However, a huge number of poor people can conceivably outbid a smaller number of richer people up to a point, because some uses for resources are of very high value, while others are not. For example, even fairly poor people will pay, in effect, several dollars per kWH to get their cell phone charged by the guy in their village who owns a couple of solar panels and a rack with some wires and plugs. You'd have to be quite rich to afford that rate for the far larger quantity of electricity required to air-condition the typical incompetently designed American or European building that's still a stifling hotbox even when it's only 65F/18C and cloudy outside.

PG--

I think if you look at per capita oil usage, it might explain why they will be able to outbid us. High cost oil doesn't affect individuals there nearly as much as it does here so a 5:1 income ratio may be insignificant if their per capita oil usage is 10:1 (merely numbers I am inventing--hey, I should work for the government or CERA). I would guess most of their oil usage goes into industry (at least until they become the car economy they are trying to achieve). They also have a tremendous number of dollars to use to buy oil right now (and into the foreseeable future) and can use those to outbid us. We, on the other hand, have a tremendous amount of debt which, when we stop getting access to additional debt, will make it very difficult to buy oil products.