What will happen too when car sales in China surpass 20m next year, as expected by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers?
Kamakshya Trivedi and Stacy Carlson from Goldman Sachs say a disturbing pattern has emerged where each tentative recovery in the world economy sets off an oil price jump that it turn aborts the process. A two point rise in global manufacturing indexes leads to a 30pc rise in oil prices a few months later.
And yes, the column discusses the U.S. shale boom:
The proper conclusion is to thank our lucky stars that US shale has helped the world avert an immediate crunch. It buys us a little more time to build a new generation of nuclear power stations — preferably based on thorium — and to achieve the Holy Grail of unsubsidised grid parity in solar technology.
Peak Oil may or may not have been discredited. Peak Cheap Oil remains to haunt us.
Was such a great article until the cop out at the end that we’re buying time for some unknown thorium plant revolution that no one really knows if it’s in the cards or even economic to do it (never mind the consequences nuclear represents as well). As a society we should be planning based on the tech was have at hand to deal with the energy transition and adjust if we have the luxury to if some not yet developed or even invented process changes the game.
Actually thorium reactors do hold tremendous potential to create a backbone network of nuclear power stations that are much safer than our current nuclear plants and certainly much safer all around then coal. Getting off of coal, even if its on to nuclear, would undeniably be of enormous benefit to health and welfare of ourselves and our planet.
The main reason why thorium was bypassed as a fuel source in the early days of nuclear energy was because the military complexes in several countries decided they needed access to weaponized fissiles which can’t be done with thorium plants.
It’s not ideal (but nothing ever is), but thorium reactors can definitely be a part of a cleaner energy future.
This paragraph is rather significant as well:
““Oil has become an increasingly scarce commodity. A tight supply picture means that incremental increases in demand lead to an increase in prices, rather than ramping up production. The price of oil is in effect acting as an automatic stabilizer,” they said. If so, it is “stabilizing” the world economy in perma-slump.”
Seems to match fairly closely what Jeff Rubin and Richard Heinberg’s recent books with the same name argue.