[FoRK] How far will the dollar fall?

[Stephen Williams]

Kevin Elliott wrote:
>
> On Apr 20, 2008, at 8:50 PM, Aaron Burt wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 02:39:00PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
>>> ...the rising cost of oil (in large part, though not exclusively, a
>>> result of the war in Iraq and resulting destabilization)...
>>
>> I'd say that the Iraq invasion had a small role in rising oil prices.
>> Production has been at roughly pre-war levels for the past while.
>> That Saudi Arabia didn't (and likely can't) increase production to meet
>> rising demand has a much larger role.
>
> Worth noting is that part of the problem/struggle/challenge in all 
> this is that because of rising demand, and the fact that getting new 
> oil supplies requires vast amounts of time and monetary capital, the 
> price of oil doesn't tell us anything about it's scarcity.  Any 
> commodity that has to sort of investment pattern will show large 
> shifts in price whenever demand increases...
>
> Of course, the great irony in all this is that from a global warming 
> perspective, expensive oil is _PRECISELY_ what the world needs.   
> Personally, it may even be preferable to some sort of carbon tax- at 
> least this way we aren't feeding even more money into the voracious 
> maw of government...
It could be argued that high oil prices, money addicted Arabs, and a 
presence to put a damper on fundamentalist muslim meme-breeding would be 
a good precursor to a green-energy technology / market boom and a 
complete deflation of the Middle East as interesting at all.

Of course, giant reserves in N. America may also do that.

Considering the endless mess that making a bunch of backward Arabs rich 
has caused, I hope they don't find big oil reserves in bad (i.e. 
primitive, broken, tribal society) Africa.

sdw