Via the BBC: Brent oil price near $60 a barrel
Brent crude fell as low as $58.38 a barrel before rising back up to $61.10 a barrel by late morning in London.US sweet crude oil traded at $64.86 per barrel, having dipped as low as $62.25.
The good news is obvious: lower energy prices are helpful, especially in the context of the problems in the economy and it should help inflationary pressures as well as be welcome news to folks who need home heating oil.
The bad news is that the main reason for the decrease in oil prices is that it reflects substantial weakening in the global economy and hence less demand, especially in the manufacturing sector.
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November 4th, 2008 at 10:34 am
[...] Steven Taylor has it over at PoliBlog. He notes a couple of reasons why this is good and a reason it is bad: The good news is obvious: lower energy prices are helpful, especially in the context of the problems in the economy and it should help inflationary pressures as well as be welcome news to folks who need home heating oil. [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 10:43 am
It may be good in the immediate short term–but not so for the long term. Economic turnaround will inevitably boost prices back up and when prices are low it makes it politically difficult to deal with the climate crisis, which economists like Nicholas Stern argue, will result in massive costs in terms of adaptation if nothing is done about it.
Unfortunately, low prices will likely inhibit the eventual transformation we have to make to a post-carbon economy.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Ratoe,
You presume that the climate crisis would stop if we abandonned all combustion on earth overnight. Probably it wouldn’t.
If you want, I can link you to a page where I’m keeping photos of my private fossil collection. I recover these by scuba diving in riverbeds, near the deltas, where the natural hydrology of tidal action and river flow pop the fossils out of the sediment they’ve been locked in for the last few million years and deposit them on the bottom of the river.
I’ve found fossilized shark teeth alongside fossilized camel teeth, because the same geographic spot on the earth has, in the last hundred million years, been ocean, dry land, and river. Multiple times, quite without the help of man. There are a lot of indicators that point to natural forces warming the earth.
If you take a wide view of the problem and realize that multiple sciences are involved, you start to see that there are forces at work on the earth that far exceed man’s considerable (and admittedly damaging) spewing of carbon into the atmosphere. Our spewing of polutants causes a lot of negative things, but the warming of the earth – probably it’s only one of many things working on that, and probably the smallest. Far greater are the increase in gross thermal output of the sun measured by the SOHO observatory, and methane off-gassing of the ocean floor and thawing tundra areas that are resultant of that (methane is about 14 times better as a greenhouse gas than CO2).
Probably the warming of the earth out of the last ice age resulted in human beings being able to achieve the civilizations that they have over the last 20,000 years (the warming of the earth enabled the industrial age; the industrial age did not cause the warming of the earth); but the climate in which this happened was freakishly temperate and by its nature unstable. The earth has spent more than 98% of its habitable (life-supporting) time either hotter or colder than it is now. The Holocene Epoch has to be viewed as a transitional period, from the Pleistocene Glaciation (an abnormally cool period or “ice age”) to something else – probably something like the Miocene, Pliocene, or even Eocene, all of which were warmer than our beloved Holocene.
It is worth noting that it has only been during the Holocene (our epoch, spanning the last 20,000 years or so) and the earth’s “ice ages” that there have been 2 polar ice caps on the earth. Most of the time, there has only been one, or there have been none; in fact, during the Eocene, the Arctic Ocean had tropical temperatures and not an iceberg in sight.
So we have to lose this notion that the way the earth is right now is “normal”. It’s not.
Personally I think we need to cut our burning habits, but for scientifically justifiable reasons: increased lung and respiratory problems; increased errosion, which leads to the silting of rivers and unsustainable nutrient blooms where they empty into the ocean; coral bleaching due to the acidification of the oceans; and other such problems.
But, as far as global warming goes, you ought to invest in some Hawaiian shirts, because there’s no stopping that train. Mother nature is behind the wheel and she will run over anyone in her path. If you take a long view of geologic time you have to realize that the current climate was unsustainable, and inevitably would change. Relocating people away from places that will be submerged is something that will have to happen sooner or later – or else you believe that the forces of nature that shaped the earth over the last billion years or so have suddenly stopped, and that the only thing at work on the earth is humans.
That would be a decidedly non-humble perspective, I think.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I’m really happy about this. Not so much because it saves me money, but because if this lasts any length of time, there are a whole lot of authoritarian scum bags who are going to have a hard time balancing their check books.
How much does Hugo Chavez need oil to cost to balance his budget? Isn’t it like 70 a barrel or something?
Nothing pleases me more than seeing guys like him get burned by their own matches.