Will peak oil cause a recession or depression? Aaron Wissner

Peak oil will cause recessions and even a great depression, at least this is the common understanding of peak oil's impact on the global economy. This means peak oil will cause more unemployment, more inflation, and general unpleasantness all around.

Teacher Aaron Wissner talks about how peak oil is likely to cause economic downturn, recession and/or recession. Peak oil is not just about gas or oil prices. Oil is what determines how the global economy functions. With less oil, there will be less growth.

Some good sources on how peak oil is impacting the economy are Colin Campbell, Richard Heinberg, and Matthew Simmons.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• peakoil
• peak
• oil
• depletion
• gas
• gasoline
• prices
• hubbert
• news
• recession
• economy
• unemployment
• depression
• jobs
• economic

[christo930]

I wonder how much the price of oil played in bringing about the collapse we are in right now? High oil prices pulled a lot of money out of the rest of the economy. $5.00 a gallon gas (close to it) reduced spending in other areas. People didn't have as many discretionary dollars as they did when oil was cheap. Then the price collapsed causing even more problems.

[newculture]

As the price of oil increased, the amount of money had to spend on their regular bills declined. Those already living from paycheck to paycheck were unable to make ends meet, and started falling behind.

This quickly exposed the extreme weakness and total lack of resilience that had been building up within the global money system.

The worst is yet to come since money is simply a claim on energy and our global money system can only function with a growing energy supply.

[13mns]

The erroneous part of this video is that there

are no alternatives to oil based energy. This

is true short term but IS NOT TRUE long term.

There are many forms of energy...fossil fuels

will give way to nuclear energy in particular fusion.

[newculture]

There are no utility fusion reactors in the world. There is no REALISTIC expectation for there ever to be. "Fusion" has always been 50 years away.

Our best bets are hydro, tidal, wave, wind, solar, and a miniscule amount of bio.

Those won't come online quickly though. They certainly won't prevent a global recession or a global depression.

[TheRadicalLiberal]

Recession or Depression?? Ha! You'd be so lucky. We are talking about the end of industrial civilization and a return to the economy of about 1750. The world cannot support anywhere near the current population so we are also talking about the extermination of probably 90% of the population too.

[james7696739]

Its worse than he says, the price of oil responds to falling demand from the West much less than it did. The price is four times what it was in 2002 and we are in the middle of a depression.

[soylentgreenb]

Sure. We've had the equivalent of $150-300/bbl here in Sweden for decades through high taxation(if you use inflation adjustments to get constant 2010 dollars).

It's no big deal. You use trains and boats to move most freight, you don't build american-style fake suburbs(real suburbs that grow up naturally under free market conditions are closer to towns; they're walkable and contain industry, shops, schools, restaurants ...), you ditch the average 1.5 occupancy SUVs etc.

[dominicanomejia]

u r out of date its all the federal government

[lickmyballsbiotch]

the human population will have to mirror that graph for a balance to happen. when ghawar dies so does your lifestyle, prepare.

[christo930]

With this global recession which is only like now just starting, it will buy us time to bring new energy supplies on line. I very much like algae as a replacement bio-fuel. There really isn't much else in the cards unless we can very quickly move the fleet over to electric cars and that won't happen in this economy. Hopefully Algae and switchgrass can work. Corn ethanol is just a waste which should be stopped right now.

[Termin8tor]

In my opinion I think it was be prudent to build electrolysis plants near dams, and power them using the dams hydro-electricity. If this could be done on a large scale it might be possible to manufacture hydrogen fuel. The downside? massive amounts of oil need to be invested in such things.

[Zyozyoma]

The economy's gonna start shrinking in time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In any country where the death rate exceeds the birth rate, like Japan, where I live, the economy can afford to be stagnant without too much negative impact, because the loss in population is reducing demand.