Michael Klare: A Take-No-Prisoners World of Oil

Michael Klare writes about A Take-No-Prisoners World of Oil.

In the end, the oil attrition wars may lead us not into a future of North American triumphalism, nor even to a more modest Saudi version of the same, but into a strange new world in which an unlimited capacity to produce oil meets an increasingly crippled capitalist system without the capacity to absorb it.

Think of it this way: in the conflagration of the take-no-prisoners war the Saudis let loose, a centuries-old world based on oil may be ending in both a glut and a hollowing out on an increasingly overheated planet. A war of attrition indeed.

Emphasis Mine

Klare also writes that cheap oil threatens banks who invested heavily in the shale-oil business. This was a very short bubble. The shortness may be a blessing in that the damage is limited when the shale-oil bubble collapses.

And, Yes, I was one of the peak-oil enthusiasts in the day.