This End Game Isn’t Going to Be Pretty and It Is Not That Far Away
Nuclear test, Bikini Island — courtesy Wikimedia Commons
One thing leads to another and before you know it ….
by Glen Hendrix
Just today (Dec. 9, 2023) I saw an article from USA Today — “Climate change is pushing Earth toward these 5 disastrous scenarios, report says.” That’s indicative of what I see concerning calamitous situations that could affect us all. It’s mostly concerning tipping points, methane leakage, and how disastrous COP28 is. There is no doubt climate change is bad and not enough is being done about it.
There is, however, something creeping up on humanity that is more immediate and, initially, more devastating than climate change. It is integral to the problem of climate change. No one talks about it, and I think that is by design. It is the end of oil.
The top seven countries for oil reserves in barrels with percentage of world supply (2016):
1. Venezuela; 299,953,000,000; 18.2%
2. Saudi Arabia; 266,578,000,000; 16.2%
3. Canada; 170,863,000,000; 10.4%
4. Iran; 157,530,000,000; 9.5%
5. Iraq; 143,069,000,000; 8.7%
6. Kuwait; 101,500,000,000; 6.1%
7. United Arab Emirates; 97,800,000,000; 5.9%
They possess 75% of the remaining oil reserves in the world. The United States is number 11 with 2.1%, but it consumes 20.3% of the 100 million barrels of oil produced every day. Let me reiterate. One out of every five barrels of oil produced on the planet is used by only 4% of the world’s population.
Those are very telling numbers. Especially since the world only has about 38 years of reserves left at that consumption rate. Reserves may last longer as previously taboo oil fields are developed, and more electric passenger cars hit the road to reduce consumption.
Wait a minute! What does it matter? We’re supposed to leave sixty percent of that in the ground because of climate change (down to 15 years left). Aren’t we going to transition to electric everything anyway? Nuclear, hydrogen, solar, tidal, hydro, and wind will generate electricity for all our needs, and we’ll just throw oil under the bus. An electric bus.
Get real. We are an oil-based economy. Our crops are harvested by giant machines running on diesel. The food is transported from fields to storage facilities and then to markets by trucks and ships running on diesel. The ore to make those machines is dug out of the ground and transported to smelters via huge machines running on diesel. The pharmaceuticals you pick up at CVS were made from guess what … diesel? Don’t be silly — petroleum stocks.
If we had started preparing fifty or so years ago for this catastrophic situation, we might currently have things like electric ships and mining equipment, but we didn’t, and we don’t, and now it’s too late.
No company is going to spend money developing machines they know will be useless two or three decades from now.
This is what’s going to happen before we run out of oil. Those seven countries are going to cut back on production. All but one, Canada, is a member of OPEC.
Whatever ideas you have in your head about these mostly Middle Eastern OPEC countries and their leaders there is one thing you should get straight. They are not idiots. They know very well that critical processes in society run on petroleum, they know time is running short, and they want to keep as much for themselves as possible. In the meantime, they also want to get top dollar for a product they know is going away and not coming back anytime soon.
It has already begun.
The Saudis announced near the end of November, 2023, continuation to March of next year one-million-barrels-a-day cuts they began in the middle of 2023. Other OPEC members are also cutting their outputs.