In my neighborhood you can’t find a 20 lb. bag of rice to save your life. Normally we shop for 50 lb. bags, but nowadays you have to settle for what you can get. And for a while, all that was to be gotten was 20 lb. bags. And now those are gone too.
Where has all the rice gone to? I know it’s something connected to high oil prices, but I can’t figure out what the connection is. And then I remember a little thing from college chemistry class, that the Haber Process is energy intensive. Thanks to Peak Oil, cheap energy looks to be a thing of the past. And without cheap energy, there’s no cheap fertilizer. No cheap fertilizer, no rice. Certainly it means the end of cheap food, at the very least.I knew something like this was coming, but I feel foolish for not being able to see this specific sequence.
For the past year and a half I’ve been preaching the gospel of Peak Oil, and more importantly, I’d been trying to figure out a way of profiting from Peak Oil, besides just buying Exxon stock. Knowledge is currency on
Wall Street, and if I’m sure that Peak Oil is a fact, while the majority either don’t know what it is or disbelieve it, that means I’ve got valuable leverage to move into things before the herd does. The only problem is the I can’t figure out how to use this knowledge, and it’s fast become too late to really profit from it.
How can I be so sure that we’ve hit Peak Oil? Oil prices are high. Even accounting for the dollar decline, prices are still high. Everytime prices were even slightly higher in the 1990s, OPEC members would cheat, and overproduce past their officially set quotas and sell the excess on the side, because they were greedy. When prices were low they were greedy.. Now that they are five times higher, all of a sudden they are not as greedy? Greedy people are always greedy, and if you give them more they just get greedier. So if OPEC members are not madly overproducing past their quota, or not even raising production quotas at all, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to, like the major media outlets keep saying. It means they can’t overproduce past their current quotas. And that is the very definition of Peak Oil.
So, those ridiculously high prices for organic food we were paying just a year ago? That’s the new price for everyday food. Gonna kinda suck living in this brave new world.
