{"id":33589,"date":"2018-04-20T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T19:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33589"},"modified":"2018-04-20T16:20:32","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T21:20:32","slug":"33589","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33589","title":{"rendered":"Why oil prices can\u2019t rise very high, for very\u00a0long"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why oil prices can\u2019t rise very high, for very\u00a0long<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Oil prices are now as high as they have been for three years. At this writing, Brent is $74.14 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate is at $68.76. These prices aren\u2019t really very high, if a person looks at the situation from a longer term point of view than the last three years.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1. EIA chart of weekly average Brent oil prices, through April 13, 2018.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There is always a question of how high oil prices can go, and for how long.<\/p>\n

In fact, we have many resources, of many kinds, whose prices of extraction keep rising higher. For example, obtaining fresh water for the world\u2019s population keeps getting more and more expensive. Some parts of the world need to resort to desalination<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The world economy cannot withstand high prices for any of these resources for very long. Certainly, it cannot withstand high prices for a combination of necessary resources, because people need to cut back on other purchases, in order to afford the necessities whose prices are rising. This article is a guest post\u00a0 by another actuary, who goes by the pseudonym Shunyata. He explains in a different way why high resource prices cannot last, whether they are for oil, or natural gas, water, or even fresh air.<\/p>\n

Dear Readers:<\/p>\n

As you are no doubt aware, Gail has created a fantastic portfolio of blogs that explore our energy\/financial\/economic system, blogs that reveal many hidden or misunderstood aspects of our situation. I have found these discussions invaluable and share them wherever I am able; to solve our societal problems we need to develop a societal understanding of these issues.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why oil prices can\u2019t rise very high, for very\u00a0long Oil prices are now as high as they have been for three years. At this writing, Brent is $74.14 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate is at $68.76. These prices aren\u2019t really very high, if a person looks at the situation from a longer term point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[251,4516,1233,588,594,1232],"class_list":["post-33589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-eia","tag-energy-information-agency","tag-gail-tverberg","tag-oil","tag-oil-prices","tag-our-finite-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33589"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33591,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33589\/revisions\/33591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}