Energy: The Vise Tightens

Australia floods sqeeze China's coal supply.

The Saudi peninsula errupts in Yemen, Bahrain and Oman, with speculation about intermediate term impacts among the Shia population in the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, and the probable hand of Iran in it all.

Libya errupts as a side show to the rest of Northern Africa, but taking its production capacity off-line raises questions about Saudi capacity to step in and fill the breach, and further reminds us that oil is not totally fungible.

North Africa is not all that rumbles. Louisiana mini earthquakes, tentatively associated with fracking activity in the area, brings to the fore the broader issue of fracking which is losing some of its glow as the no-brainer replacement for OPEC oil in our energy future.

And then there is the rumble on the far side of the Pacific, which did far more than damage Japan's coast--it put nuclear energy, that other silver bullet in our energy future, in the penalty box with deep-sea oil drilling.

Meanwhile,spot energy prices oscillate in a relatively narrow range to Japan's nuclear crisis, but swing more erratically with the Mideast.  Does that tell us something?

Any of these issues would be serious in themselves, but the confluence of all of them in such a narrow time range should give us pause.  It would be great to be able to dismiss this all as bizarre happenstance that will fade from memory, except for the ritual "on this day in 2011....".  But these events, or most of them, have structural consequences that will not subside. They will build, one on another, until the critical mass collapses the energy dependent society we still cling to.

Yet there remains no apparent acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation in US officialdum.  The Republicans remain dutiful shills for the vested energy interests; the Democrates cling to their tradition of philosophical disorganization, and the President still sees Clean Energy as a jobs program, and not Energy as a national crisis.

All of the above crises seem to share one of two characteristics: disorganization of the various stakeholders to effect change; or brittle leadership by the dominant player. There is no vision, no responsive leadership, no committed followership.

The roller coaster ride that is the world economy still dominates all other issues, and seems as intractible as energy, though it is dependent on energy.  Both paradigms appear to be careening down a road, focusing on the immediate curves, and oblivious to the cliff that awaits them.  The stock markets sustain their inflated values. Energy remains priced in the short term, and therefore underpriced for the long term. Bystanders who attempt to discern anything from the markets might just as well study the comics.

Onward.