Kunstler Has Questions for Obama About Our Oil Future

James Howard Kunstler is an admirer of Barack Obama, yet he doesn't believe that the new President will be able to prevent what he terms "The Long Emergency." From this week's edition of Kunstler's on-line musings:

For instance, does Mr. O know that global oil production appears to have peaked at around 85 million barrels a day, with poor prospects of ever getting beyond that? This single naked fact has broad ramifications, above all whether we can continue to think in terms of industrial "growth" as the benchmark for economic health.

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Does Mr. O know that world oil discovery has fallen to insignificant levels after peaking long ago in the 1960s. Does he know we are finding no more super-giant oil fields on the scale of Arabia's Ghawar or Mexico's Cantarell, which have supplied most of the world's oil for the past forty years and are now running down?

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Does Mr. O know that oil exports have been trending to decline at a steeper rate than oil depletion? That is, the exporting nations are losing their ability to send oil to the importers ... Does he know Mexico's net exports are crashing? Mexico has been our number three leading source of imports. In a very few years they will not be able to send us any oil. A deluded American public has no idea that this is happening. Will Mr. O explain it to them?

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Does Mr. O know that the "old major" oil companies (Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, Shell, et al) produce less than 10 percent of the world's oil now -- the other 90 percent coming from the foreign nationals -- and that blaming them for the situation is a waste of time.

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Does Mr. O know that the current drop in oil prices (due to massive financial deleveraging) has resulted in the cancellation or postponment of the very oil production projects that were hoped to offset the coming depletions?