“…Flogging a very dead horse…”
||| FROM DANIEL GOTTLIEB |||
From Yahoo: “…Commodities strategists at Wall Street’s top investment banks expect 2026 and 2027 to be tough years for the oil industry. And that’s after a nearly 20% decline in oil prices this year.
Under a base case set by JPMorgan’s commodities team led by Natasha Kaneva, Brent crude oil (BZ=F) — the international benchmark price — will fall to $58 per barrel in 2026, with West Texas Intermediate crude oil (CL=F), the US benchmark, trading $4 below this level. In 2027, the firm sees prices falling by another $1 per barrel.
“At the risk of flogging a very dead horse, our message to the market has remained consistent since June 2023,” JPMorgan strategists wrote. “While demand is robust, supply is simply too abundant.”
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Too often we feel like there is nothing we can do about the climate crisis. The problems are too complex, wealth and its power too huge: the weak, deceptively incapable politicians, the too-capable lobbyists–and our political will for change misdirected towards meaningless dead ends.
Well, step up and smell the flowers. Demand for oil has now been cut to the point that refinery “mishaps,” wars, cartel throttling of supply, and political maneuvering have been overcome by the political will of the people and our impact on markets.
We are starting to win the climate change fight by reducing our use of fossil fuels, worldwide. You can make a difference.
This Thanksgiving, there are many problems facing our nation. One of those problems, the apparent climate impasse to finding solutions, has developed significant cracks. Evidenced by the reduced use of oil and its subsequent impact on prices. This is worth celebrating.
Genuine cuts in oil use evokes real hope for our future. Install solar and batteries. Buy an EV (Electric Vehicle, or a PHEV), or even a hybrid. All of these systems reduce oil use. That is our win. The rest of the “solutions” are too-often nothing more then “the rhetoric of failure”.
Most surprising in all this, market mechanisms can still work. Who’da thunk?
And for investors, think short.
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The process described will swing from balance point to balance point. We need to keep in mind that as fossil fuels get cheaper, the measurable individual cost/personal benefit will shift against EVs unless governments impose sufficient taxes on fossil fuels to subsidize EVs and otherwise remediate ecological damage. There being mayhem in Washington D.C., each state will go its own way.
As important, I think, is to make EVs cheap enough to become universal, extending to those who today cannot afford them. The purchase of a car is the first hurdle and can largely determine what energy source is used, notwithstanding the long term savings inherent in EVs.
Rather than framing success as “everyone purchase an EV,” we might think in terms of reducing the overall number of vehicle trips on our roads without significantly limiting our ability to get around.
A holistic approach to this problem recognizes that underutilized resources—like vehicles sitting idle in driveways—represent environmental waste in themselves.
Well-designed public transit could be another effective part of the solution. Buses, shuttles, or vans would reduce our carbon footprint, road wear, tire shedding, and resource usage while also serving visitors who arrive by boat without their own transportation.
Ummm… the data says no, we aren’t.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fossil-fuel-consumption
Also, EVs are essentially a conversion of fossil fuels into batteries, plastic, and electronics via mining, refining and coal and gas-fired power plants for electricity. You can’t build an EV without massive amounts of fossil fuels!
As Jean Baptiste Fressoz showed in this book More and More and More, there has never been a “replacement” of any material (energy or otherwise), except wool, in recent history. Economic growth is tied directly to energy and materials. If the economy is growing, so is energy and materials use. One look at the graph at that link shows exactly that: reductions in fossil fuel use coincide with recessions (e.g. 2008 and 2020). Oil prices are determined in part by the people who want the economy to keep growing, not simply by demand. When prices are too high, it leads to increased inflation and slower economic growth as the cost of transportation, manufacturing, and other oil-based products and services rises. This reduces consumer spending power, impacts businesses, and can lead to lower stock prices. When prices are too low, then ROI for energy companies is too low and so production falls. Layoffs in the oil industry and related sectors like construction and equipment supply follow.
I agree that on a whole life analysis, EVs are not fossil-fuel free in their design, materials, or construction, but they’re still ahead of fossil fueled vehicles. No one is talking about any mode of transportation that is fossil fuel free, not even walking, when you consider humans on a whole life analysis.
Nevertheless, transportation entails a huge chunk of our carbon contribution and is most amenable to individual and organized group action.
People might consider attending Islands Stewards’ zoom tomorrow, Sunday Nov. 30, at 3:30 PM for further discussion. Look up Island Stewards on line a learn how to register.
Caitlin Johnstone 11/21/25– Nobody’s Coming To Humanity’s Rescue; We’ve Got To Save Ourselves
“When you look at the existential crises facing humanity today, it’s tempting to find hope in some belief about external forces coming to our rescue without our having to struggle and change ourselves. You see such salvation stories everywhere”
“AI isn’t going to save us. Tech innovation isn’t going to save us. Your favorite politician isn’t going to save us. The Epstein files aren’t going to save us. China isn’t going to save us. The aliens aren’t going to save us.”
“No one is coming to save us. There is no deus ex machina resolution to the plotline of the human story.”
“We’re going to have to save ourselves.”
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/nobodys-coming-to-humanitys-rescue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=179513586&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=24t3av&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I don’t understand this article. It hurts my head. Fossil fuel use hit an all time high in 2024. Even coal use is not diminishing. In 2024, China opened two coal-fired power plants per week. Buying a new Tesla or a Toyota “Pious” might make you feel better or superior, but it is not helping anything. They guy that keeps his 20 year old Civic running is way ahead of you.
I’ll add, I read a WSJ article yesterday about the Trump Administration’s recent dealings with the Kremlin and various Russian oligarchs. The article was about the relationships the TA is cultivating, but some choice quotes jumped out at me:
““Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal…”
“Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.”
“Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.”
“The U.S. and Russia were discussing major agreements on oil-and-gas exploration and Arctic transportation, Dmitriev told the Journal. “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic,” he said.”
“Kremlin-linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as potentially four other locations…”
“Russia has also mentioned rare-earth mining opportunities near the massive nickel mines of Norilsk and in as many as six other Siberian locations that are still unexploited…”
Russia has lots of medium-heavy crude oil (used to make diesel; the US has light sweet crude, used to make jet fuel and kerosene). Russia has lots of mining; the rare earths and nickel and other metals are used, among many other things, to make batteries and steel. It’s worth noting that Norilsk is infamous for being “the most polluted city in the world” thanks to the metals mining there (mining done with diesel fuel!).
Another quote from a different article: “China’s coal output hit an all-time high in 2024, with the total up by 1.3% on year at 4.76 billion tonnes.” China has very little oil. One of the reasons they are going all in on EVs is because they can run those cars on coal-fired electricity power. China has lots of coal.
China has also made HUGE investments into mining in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for copper and cobalt, Zambia and Botswana for copper, Mali and Zimbabwe for lithium, and South Africa for a range of metals like chromium and manganese. Grid infrastructure and EV batteries require these metals. Read Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara for a sense of what life is like working in a Chinese metal mine in Africa (short story: it’s brutal).
Astute local comments on a silly, rose-colored glasses take on a clear statement of robust increasing fossil fuel consumption while supplies increase to the point of over-supply. Simple economics. Our nation is accelerating ourselves and the world toward the cliff of no return that is near by. The Trump administration is joyfully hammering the last nails into our collective coffin. This county’s use of fossil fuels and emissions are so insignificant as to be meaningless. The idea that this archipelago can become a beacon of light in terms of energy conservation, land use, ecological health, community resilience and self-reliance is delusional nonsense if you just take a look around. But as individuals wiling and able to conserve we should continue to do so, as I have nearly my entire adult life, because it is morally right and I am nature-centric. I estimate that there are
no more than 25% of the county’s residents that hold such values dear despite all the flowery rhetoric and continual efforts of that same small cohort since the 1980s. Ecotopian we are not but a more robust and seasonally stable local economies accompanied by “managed” population growth holds promise.
Hi Steve,
I am glad you enjoyed my “…Silly, rose-colored glasses take on a clear statement of robust increasing fossil fuel consumption…”
Your unique commentary, derived from object-based sources, honed by a method on wit, and deeply mired in economic apprehension is a revolutionary viewpoint–in its way. Because–in my 37 years of working on the climate crisis–you are the first to label my viewpoint on fossil fuels and climate change as “silly and rose-colored.”
To further your enjoyment, perhaps you might like to read one of my five books on anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance (global warming)?
Keep writing!
Dan
Hey Dan
I retract the word silly as inaccurate and abuse of your noted expertise. Congrats on the hard work of writing pertinent books presumably warning of the dire consequences of continuing fossil voracious fuel consumption. I stand by my use of “pollyannish” in reading your hopeful Thanksgiving tiding claiming that a significant decrease in fossil fuel use is happening. I fervently wish it was so. A drop in fuel prices is the direct result of vastly increased production with America proudly in the lead and does not in any way indicate success in a significant switch to electrons. You are right in thinking that I am deeply apprehensive of capitalist economics disastrously twisted under the Trump administration at this critical stage in human history. I do not need to read any more books with regard to climate weirding. As a longtime resident in the sub-arctic in Alaska my years living in the woods, work with native peoples and scientists as well as living with obvious and accelerated ecological changes has informed my opinions for the last 50 years.
Write on!