kunkmiester wrote:The “Hotelling rule”, named after the late US mathematician Harold Hotelling, states that the price of an exhaustible commodity should converge towards the price of a substitute resource.
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll ... columnists
This isn't obvious from the wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_rule
Can someone show a little better how they got the conclusion, or is did someone leave stuff out when they wrote the wiki page? It makes sense, and there are a number of examples--whale oil to kerosene is the one I know of.
One of the problems with the Peak Oil theory is that, despite being created by the Club of Rome which also created the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, the two theories are mutually contradictory. The UN IPCC reports predict that we will consume 10 times more oil over the 21st century than the Peak Oilers claim is even in the ground (not even counting the fact that most oil remains in the ground, we only recover a few percent of it)....
Peak Oil theory came to popularity at the promotion of large oil hedge fund traders like T Boone Pickens, among others. They use the theory to justify scaring other traders into buying into oil price bull markets that are triggered by events (like sabotage in nigeria) and not long term fundamentals trends. The traders have used it to entice Sovereign Wealth Fund managers for Norway, Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, and several other countries to do straw man trading through them on commodity markets. It was this sovereign wealth fund trading that ran up oil prices in the summer of 2007 and triggered the economic collapse.
Folks like T Boone Pickens are also using Peak Oil theory to motivate changes in the energy infrastructure of the US in ways that are intended to benefit themselves primarily. Pickens is a major stockholder in General Electric, in addition to owning his huge wind energy project in Texas and the land the turbines are on which was previously either spent oil fields or low value scrubland. General Electric is building the generators and turbines for Pickens project, and also happens to be majority owner of NBC Universal, which owns MSNBC, the liberal global warming/peak oil harpie network, and is partners with Oprah Winfrey, in addition to owning the recording company that is behind all the recording artists who are so active on the green/global warming public scene, such as Will I Am (also BFF with Oprah).
Furthermore, Pickens and GE are partners with Al Gore in the carbon trading exchange project that will profit the most from cap and trade legislation.
As can be seen, theres a rather deep and widespread PR campaign behind promoting both Peak Oil and Global Warming which is focused on driving the shift to natural gas consumption at peak market prices, and to keep oil prices artificially high for as long as possible.