Stories tagged with depletion rate

Answering the Comfortable Questions about Energy

Posted by Heading Out on June 27, 2008 - 10:00am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: commodities, depletion rate, flow rate, oil, peak oil, saudi arabia, speculators [list all tags]

There is an old vaudeville skit that has an actor (Annie) come on stage behind the M.C. and begin visibly searching the floor of the stage. “What are you doing, Annie?” asks the M.C. “Looking for my ring,” she says. So they both start to look over the floor. After a while the M.C. looks at Annie and asks “Where did you lose it?” “Backstage,” says Annie. “Then why are we looking for it out here?” asks the M.C. “Because it is too dark to see backstage,” says Annie.

I was reminded of this skit as I watched a ”panel of experts” on the PBS News Hour with a couple of energy analysts talking about petroleum economics, and the cause of the current price rise. Their reasons (one blaming it in part on the Federal Reserve decision to cut interest rates) related to their areas of expertise and knowledge in the Commodities Markets. It is a common failing. Experts will try and explain events or seek to control events, based on their what they know and are comfortable with discussing (where it is light), rather than necessarily going to the root cause of the problem (where the ring was dropped). It is a fault both of those who select the experts to give an opinion, and the focus of those experts, and where this approach is used extensively it tends to hide the nature of the true problem from the public, in the obfuscations of those who are comfortable only when turning the question to allow answers that relate to subjects they know about.

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