Credit: Google
The most significant development in the world economy in 2014 was the collapse in the price of oil. (emphasis added)
The near-50 per cent drop in the price of internationally traded Brent crude from a high of more than $115 a barrel in June to less than $60 earlier this month has put extra money into consumers’ pockets and boosted fuel-intensive businesses such as airlines, while cutting oil companies’ revenues and stoking financial crises in oil-producing countries including Russia and Venezuela.
The roots of the price collapse lie in the US shale oil boom, which began when small and medium-sized producers worked out in 2009-10 how to apply to oil production the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that had already been highly successful for natural gas.
US oil production has soared, from about 5m barrels a day in 2008 to 9.1m b/d this month. For the first three years of the boom, the rise in US output was offset by other supplies […]
As far as I am concerned, increasing the amount of petroleum and natural gas that are mined is causing environmental disaster, not only because of the pollution caused by the mining itself, but because the stuff they mine are not sealed in glass bottles to be exhibited in science museums. The primary purpose is to enrich those who control the mines, and the second purpose is to burn most of it. As Mrs. Peacham in The Threepenny Opera said, “Fools! Idiots! All of them!”