Sacramento
I was thinking of heading to the gas station to see how much the local retailer will pay me to fill up my tank. As the Washington Post explained this week, an oil glut caused “sellers holding U.S. crude contracts (to pay) buyers as much as $30 per barrel to take it off their hands.” Unfortunately, I haven’t started up my car for a while — and the tank remains full. And all those assorted taxes still keep gas prices here at around two bucks a gallon.
Nevertheless, the dramatic tanking of oil prices brought to mind one of my favorite doomsday predictions. “Ever since the end of World War II, we’ve embarked on this project to build ourselves a drive-in utopia — an economy based on suburban land development, eight-lane freeways lined with fry pits and hamburger shacks and a national big-box chain retail system,” argued social critic James Howard Kunstler in a 2005 interview with Grist.
In Kunstler’s view, none of that is sustainable because it’s based on overly cheap oil to move us and our stuff around. “We are at or near the peak right now because oil markets are wobbling and prices are volatile, and there is no swing producer,” Kunstler added. He figured that by around 2008 “our lives are going to be noticeably beginning to be disrupted” and by 2015 “you will see the beginning of a major collapse of suburbia.” Instead, oil is less valuable than hand sanitizer. Suburbia might survive a few more years, after all.
The internet is a great way to track past predictions. In 1982, writer and investor Douglas Casey offered his speculator’s guide for profiting from the coming Greater Depression, which he predicted had already started. The economy had its ups and downs in the ensuing 38 years, but nothing (even in 2008) that looks like a massive depression. In one of his newsletters last month, however, he argued that “Right now, very few people are willing to consider the possibility of tough times — let alone the Greater Depression.”
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See Also:
(1) Someone Must Be Held Accountable
(2) Chinese Wuhan Virus: Stanford Study Shows Far More Prevalent Far Less Deadly
(4) Trump pushes back against CDC director’s warning about coronavirus second wave
