This is the best summary I could come up with:
Oil prices are on track to reach $100 a barrel this month for the first time in 2023 after surging by almost 30% since June, after Russian and Saudi Arabian production cuts and rising demand from China.
Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia extended 1.3m barrels per day (bpd) of combined cuts to the end of the year, accelerating a drawdown in global inventories.
The report was released just a day after Opec announced that the market was facing a deficit of more than 3m bpd in the upcoming quarter, potentially resulting in the most substantial supply shortage in more than a decade.
Saudia Arabia and its partners in Opec are also concerned that the IEA has predicted that demand for oil will peak before 2030, which some analysts believe could be brought forward to 2026 by the rapid switch to renewables already under way.
The rising cost of fuel and demand from the Chinese economy, which ranks as the world’s biggest oil importer, are expected to cloud the outlook for central banks and their mission to bring down inflation rates that are still well above the 2% target level.
US central bank interest rates were widely expected to have hit a peak after a drop last month in core inflation, which strips out volatile elements such as fuel and food.
The original article contains 630 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Oh no! If only we had some other means of creating or storing energy, if only there was a way to rid us of the dependency of oil!
Nuclear?
Everything else has a huge dependency on environmental factors (wind, sunlight, water) or storage resources which are harmful to scale up without safety consideration.
That’s a convenient sound bite that really ignores actual data on renewables.
The actual data on renewables is impressive, but not nearly impressive enough to stop climate change…as.anyone can see who is paying attention to the emissions data.
Renewables still greatly depend on fossil fuels as a backup power and thermal power source, which is why fossil fuel companies are promoting renewables-only to the masses.
It ensures society remains dependent on fossil fuels for the next decades, albeit at a lower intensity. Which works out very well for them, since they already passed peak production and just want to sell the remaining stock as long as possible for the highest price.
Once we crank up a few hundred nuclear reactors to serve as the backup for renewables and as a thermal energy source for producing synthetic hydrocarbons, then fossil fuels will become obsolete.
Until then, we’re going to be partly dependent on fossil fuels and pay a hefty price for them.
Renewables are highly volatile and storage technology isn’t there yet for most large grids. Right now that stability must come from coal, LNG, or nuclear, with some exceptions like geothermal. Pick your poison. China is building 5-10 giant new coal plants per year to satisfy this demand, despite being one of the cheapest places in the world to manufacture solar panels and turbines. If we care about the environment, we’ll choose nuclear. Germany’s “green” party has successfully lobbied to effectively end nuclear support in the country, and now they have to significantly increase coal and lignite consumption following the Russian LNG embargo.
I don’t understand why nuclear has to be a dirty word. Modern reactors are clean and safe. Far better for the environment than coal and LNG.
Nuclear should absolutely be part of the picture. That being said, nuclear does a bad job scaling up for peak demands over base load. Better than solar or wind for sure but not good enough. For a fossil fuel free world we do need energy storage. Luckily pumped water energy storage is pretty viable.
Wish I knew what the oil cartels hope to achieve with this. It’s not as if we’re ever going to soften on support for Ukraine. Maybe just lashing out?
As well as the EV transition is going, we’re still decades away from them becoming the dominant consumer vehicle worldwide. Even further away for commercial vehicles, and further away still for shipping and planes. These countries are making hay while the sun is shining. If the West had any balls it would sanction the shit out of cartels like OPEC. Problem is, voters punish politicians who allow gas prices to rise, and OPEC knows this. We’re not willing to trigger a price war by enacting sanctions.
Super agree that they strongly prefer a certain stripe of US politician, understand our electorate, and pull their levers accordingly. It would be immense if we could short circuit that weakness in our democracy somehow. A green new deal would have done that, but the Dem party oldsters seem to hate that idea.
So we should expect more interest raises to efficiently transfer money from the poor to the wealthy… ehm… keep inflation at bay…
High interest rates and inflation hurt people with money and help people with debt. As interest rates rise, the value of assets decreases. The inverse relationship is strong and well tested. Debt, on the other hand, loses value with inflation. Inflation paid off 20% of my mortgage over the last few years.
No one likes high inflation. It’s definitely not a scheme to transfer wealth. That’s the status quo with 2% inflation and cheap debt for the wealthy to use.
High interest rates and inflation hurt people with money and help people with debt.
Lol, wut?
Inflation allows borrowers to pay lenders back with money worth less than when it was originally borrowed.
Inflation is in fact a massive transfer wealth from the lenders to the borrowers, measure in trillions.
Econ 101
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111414/does-inflation-favor-lenders-or-borrowers.asp
I’m not saying runaway inflation is generally good. It’s not, especially if ongoing for long. I’m just talking about lenders and borrower.
The impact of interest rates is a lot less cut and dry.
Haven’t we had oil at $100 a barrel before, and not that many years ago? And yet fuel and energy prices were lower.
It’s almost as if the price the consumer pays has absolutely nothing to do with cost.
Yeah, but how are they supposed to keep record profits when their costs are so high. /s
Don’t forget, next year they need to hit 104% the amount they did this year. Crank up the prices!
It’s actually pretty well correlated once you remove state taxes, which have increased significantly in some states like California. Mississippi gas, for example, is cheaper now than 2010, with respect to crude prices and discounted for inflation.
Gas was $100 a barrel under Bush. It was like $2 a gallon.
Dad said “Jesus criminey were not going anywhere for a week!”
V.V I paid 3.75 a gallon 3 days ago.
I remember seeing $5/gal under Bush. His last year had an average of $3.30 and peaked over $4… https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/gasoline-prices-fared-under-last-190000869.html
I imagine everything else became more expensive too, labor, shipping, processing, etc
