It added that it now expects global oil prices to sink substantially, which will cause considerable problems for gas and oil producers such as Russia and Libya and trigger changes in the Middle East.
The report said such changes would cause the biggest risks for Iran, Libya, Venezuela and Yemen, because the governments in these producer countries were banking on high prices.
It said it is possible crude oil prices will fall lastingly to about $80 per barrel.
As oil prices remain high, we once again see murmurs of anticipated doom from various quarters. Such fears are grossly miscalculated, as I have described in my 2007-08 articles about how oil at $120/barrel creates desirable chain reactions, as well as my rebuttal to the poorly considered beliefs of peak oil alarmists, who seem capable of being sold not one, but two bridges in Brooklyn. Today, however, I am going to combine the concepts in both of those articles with some new analysis I have done to enable us to predict when oil will lose the economic power it currently holds. You are about to see that not only are peak oil alarmists wrong, but they are just about as wrong as those predicting in 1988 that the Soviet Union would soon dominate the world, and will soon be equally worthy of ridicule.
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In short, the best tool we have for curbing Iran’s influence is not containment or engagement, but getting the price of oil down
In a free market high prices encourage development of production capacity (to exploit the high prices), which then drives prices back towards the marginal cost of production. Absent a cartel or idiot gooberment excessive prices are temporary.
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.
The whole idea behind peak oil wasn't that we were running out of oil but that the financial markets would be thrown out of whack by higher oil prices. This presumes the financial markets weren't totally out of whack to begin with, if you listen to a guy like Max Keiser the story you get is that we no longer have a market economy, rather a command economy where all prices are manipulated without any supply/demand price discovery.
Sorry, I won't drink benzene to screw the Arabs. Not even "just a little bit."
We need a directorate of science, and we need it to be voted on only by scientists. You don't get to vote on reality. Get over it. Elected officials that deny the findings of the Science Directorate are subject to immediate impeachment for incompetence.