White-Knuckled Anxiety
2008 was certainly a year of "interesting times," as the Chinese proverb says. The evening market reports became an exercise in white-knuckled anxiety that rivals even the best Hollywood thriller. And while media pundits of every stripe play the blame game, few focus attention on those pins that first pricked the mortgage bubble: a major spike in food prices, driven by diversion of the global food supply into ethanol, followed by a major spike in fuel prices. Homeowners had been making their mortgage payments just fine until global demand for fuels outpaced global supply.
Energy Resource Decline
Behind all the misbegotten financial wizardry of the evening market reports lurks another ogre, one with potentially bigger teeth than anything we have seen to date. Its name is energy resource decline and, according to many observers, it ensures that when economic recovery comes it will not be because anything has been "fixed" — it will be because our economy has changed fundamentally.
In a nutshell, energy resource decline means that energy availability is falling due to fewer energy resources left in nature, particularly with regard to oil. Throughout 2008, the International Energy Agency conducted a survey of the world's 800 top oilfields to determine how much oil remains in the ground. Its 2008 report, released Nov. 12 and titled World Energy Outlook , reveals that " decline rates are likely to rise significantly in the long term.
Author: Paula Hay
Copyright 2009 StartupNation, LLC
Click here to read more from StartupNation