The Oil Drum

This is crossposted from the European Tribune, as well as from DailyKos, where this series was started in June 2005 as oil prices were closing in on the $60 mark. All previous installments are listed at the end of this post; most have focused on the physical and political factors that have been pushing prices up and are meant to be read by non specialists (so my apologies if I spend too much time explaining things which may be obvious to regular readers of TOD). A useful companion to this opus is DoDo's Oil price in euros which has various graphs showing oil prices in euros and inflation-corrected in both dollars and euros.

We look back to a week where new record highs were set almost every day for both oil prices (above $93) and the euro (above $1.44) against the dollar. On this round number juncture, we can note that we're less than 10% away from the other symbolic line I chose in June 2005 as a target to be reached inexorably, and that it's pretty likely that this $100 figure will be reached before opus 100 is written (and I expect to continue to stick to writing just under 2 opuses per month as from the beginning).

But rather than focusing on the most recent prices, I'd like to flag a distinction that Michael Klare, in an excellent article over at the Nation (Beyond the Age of Petroleum) makes:

This past May, in an unheralded and almost unnoticed move, the Energy Department signaled a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. The department stopped talking about "oil" in its projections of future petroleum availability and began speaking of "liquids."