"Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself." -- Thomas Merton
Let's be more precise -- Jeffco schools know there is a recession going on for THEM -- they don't seem to know (or care) that there are harder economic times going on for the taxpayers.
I would absolutely oppose any kind of tax increase by the Jefferson County school district in 2008. There is serious price inflation going on that impacts the vast majority of people living in Jefferson County. Gasoline is nearly $4.00 a gallon now and is not expected to decline much ... perhaps ever again; groceries cost more every week; home values are declining putting some families in difficult equity situations; jobs are getting scarcer; college tuitions are going up and health care premiums are going up.
And guess what? Every household in Jefferson County has to deal with higher costs and stagnant income. ... Jeffco schools are just going to have to do the same.
Besides, my personal experience with the Jeffco schools in recent years has left me with very little reason to provide them with more funds. As I have stated on this web site before, I have mostly praise for the teachers -- they do the best they can under the oppressive burden of federal, state and local administrative red tape and bureaucracy. The Jeffco school board and administrators have been way too compliant with the CSAP regimen and they have seemed to fully embrace the paranoia of "zero tolerance" and silly political correctness.
Until I see some genuine reform and some courage to do things differently, I would not support a call to give more money to the school board and administrators to spend on consultants, bond sellers and building contractors.
With fuel prices, health care costs and employee compensation packages increasing, Superintendent Cindy Stevenson says the district has to go the ballot again just four years after voters passed the largest school bond issue in Colorado history.
"If the quality of education in JeffCo declines due to funding, we have 85,000 children who will pay a price," said Dr. Stevenson, superintendent of Jefferson County Schools, the largest district in the state.
Stevenson says the district is considering two ballot issues. One is a bond between $323 million and $350 million to rebuild and repair eight high schools, four middle schools, and 70 elementary schools. The superintendent says a big focus will be to upgrade facilities for 21st century instruction.
"Part of the bond issue is increasing technology in thousands of our classrooms," said Stevenson.
The money may also be used to build two new schools in fast-growing areas of Lakewood and Arvada.
"We're trying to be proactive, rather than reactive. We want to keep our buildings repaired," said Stevenson. "We want our neighborhoods to have good housing values."
She says if passed, a $350 million bond issue would increase the property taxes of homeowners because the district has paid off past debt. But, it would prevent property taxes from going down.
The other ballot issue will affect taxes.
Stevenson says JeffCo also needs a mill levy override of between $32 million and $36 million. That would increase property taxes about $108 a year for a $300,000 home. The superintendent says the other alternative is massive budget cuts starting in the 2009-2010 school year.
"So, over three years, we're looking at a potential $32 million worth of reductions," said Stevenson.
She says if cuts are made, a significant number of teachers will be cut and class sizes will increase.
"So, we feel that we have a moral obligation to go to our voters and say, 'Do you want us to begin that reduction cycle or do you want us to sustain our class sizes, our well-trained teachers, current and guaranteed viable curriculum?'" ... MORE
Here is a letter-to-the-editor that appeared in Monday's Colorado's Rocky Mountain News:
Recently, our governor, Bill Ritter, our senator, Ken Salazar, and one of our representatives, Mark Udall, testified in Washington to postpone the recovery of oil in western Colorado ("Oil shale hits roadblock in Senate," May 16).
They caved in to special interests that want to prevent any exploration of oil in this country even though oil prices are skyrocketing and gasoline prices are making ordinary Americans go broke. Their acts are shameful!
It has been known for many years that there is about twice the amount of oil under western Colorado than is under all of Saudi Arabia.
The successful mining of this oil could make the United States self-sufficient. As it is, we are sending billions of dollars to countries that are our enemies to provide the oil necessary to run this country.
How could our elected officials betray the citizens of Colorado and the rest of the United States for political gain - to gain the favor of special-interest groups that want this country to move back to the Dark Ages? We need to contact our elected officials and tell them that we need this oil.
There are a couple of things I want to observe about this point of view.
First, in the age of the internet, it is astounding that folks will so blithely display purposeful ignorance. It takes about thirty seconds to find out about oil shale. Here's the Wikipedia citation: Oil Shale. So, oil shale isn't 'oil' in the first place and refining what it contains -- 'kerogen' -- into a usable liquid fuel is difficult and terribly expensive in terms of environmental costs, monetary costs and energy costs. Indeed, there is not even now an efficient, effective way to extract large quantities of kerogen from the rocks under western Colorado. In other words, because the author of this letter wouldn't take five minutes to inform his political opinion, he looks like a fool.
But, of course, knowledge and facts are beside the point ... which brings me to my second observation. The writer of the letter-to-the-editor intuits that we are in the beginning stages of what could be a catastrophic loss and tragedy for human beings, especially in the United States. What we witness in the letter correlates with the Kübler-Ross model of the 'Five Stages of Grief' on a global scale.
I see most Americans by-and-large in the first two phases of the five stages of grief concerning the arrival of peak oil. We hear 'denial' and 'anger' over the high cost of gasoline and the fact that oil production has plateaued in the face of increasing demand. 'Bargaining', 'depression' and 'acceptance' are sure to come as energy costs continue to rise and shortages finally intrude upon our everyday lives.
As in the letter, there is denial that anything we have done before has has any consequences on our present state. Waste, convenience, materialism, and insatiablility simply cannot have been an ingredient in our past behavior that has squandered a precious natural resource to the point where scarcity could be a new possibility. For all of the marvelous technological advances that derived from the hydrocarbon age, we have acted like the oil would flow forever and have wasted it equally on frivolous and unnecessary toys and endeavors.
Now, in the face of gasoline price increases, the denial becomes angry: it is the fault of environmentalists; it is the fault of government bureaucrats; it is the fault of greedy oil executives and speculators; it is everyone else's fault expect for the writer, folks like him and their gas guggling SUVs, motor boats, RVs, ATVs -- and their lust for cheap consumer goods. If only the environmentalists would go away we could drill ANWR, the Florida and California coasts. and we could strip mine all of the oil shale out of western Colorado ... then gasoline would cost pennies per gallon again -- everybody could drive Hummers and we could keep on buying greeting cards shipped in from China that cost 89 cents.
But denial and anger will not change the truth. The first news report below tells the real tale -- the third largest contributor of crude oil to the U.S. is Mexico ... and that country's petroleum production has peaked and is in decline.
The essay by James Howard Kunstler further illustrates the consequences of peak oil.
The nation is full of people these days like the writer of the letter-to-the-editor ... sadly, their denial and anger will only further injure themselves in the long run ... but you know better, of course. Don't you?
Petroleos Mexicanos, the state-owned oil company, said April crude production fell the most in more than 12 years as output at its largest field declined faster than the company forecast.
Crude oil production fell 13 percent to 2.767 million barrels a day in April, Mexico City-based Pemex, as the company is known, said today on its Web site. Output a year earlier was 3.182 million barrels a day. The decline was the largest since October 1995, when output fell 29 percent.
Pemex Chief Executive Officer Jesus Reyes Heroles set a goal of producing 3.1 million barrels of crude a day in July of last year. The company has only met that goal once since it was set. Output has been on a decline since reaching a peak in December 2003. Since 1999, proved reserves have been more than halved to 14.7 billion barrels of crude oil equivalent.
``There is no clear sign that this decline is going to slow down,'' said David Shields, an independent energy analyst in Mexico City. `` I don't think there is any point in trying to forecast an annual average.'' ...
... Output at Cantarell, Pemex's biggest field, fell 33 percent to 1.07 million barrels a day, according to the Energy Ministry. That was the lowest output since March 1996 at the field, which peaked at 2.192 million barrels a day in December 2003 and once accounted for about 60 percent of the company's output.
The company forecast output at Cantarell would fall 15 percent annually until 2012.
Exports fell 14 percent to 1.439 million barrels a day. Pemex, the third-largest supplier of crude to the U.S., has said it will cut exports as output falls so that it can refine more of its own oil.
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.
And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.
Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.
The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.
These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.
Filling up the Prius at the Safeway gas station in Arvada, Colorado, still costs me less than thirty dollars. The family owns two of these hybrids and an 80 mile per gallon scooter for getting around. Peak oil and overpopulation have been on my mind for the past ten years and we have planned and made decisions accordingly.
Nevertheless, I haven't posted in a few days because I have been mentally and emotionally digesting a look again at University of Colorado professor Dr. Albert Bartlett's lecture on exponential growth, population and energy. In light of recent economic developments, Bartlett's talk takes on new immediacy -- that is -- the end IS near.
Please look at the "Most Important Video You'll Ever See" below ... make sure and take a little time and view the continuing parts on YouTube. Our destiny is all there.
However, in this post I've included some other important links, news, graphs and articles. They are all corroborating evidence and analysis for the fact that there are too many people making too many demands for the Earth's resources -- a breaking point has or will soon occur.
The tragic part of this is that we've know about this problem for years now ... but we (the human species as a whole) have done almost nothing to mitigate the coming disaster. It is now too late. Though it is unfashionable, even considered impolite by some to speak plainly of our dismal future, I will certainly not indulge in 'feel good' optimism for the sake of causing anyone to remain in their state of comfortable denial.
The truth is that world population is now estimated at over 6.7 billion people, the U.S. at over 300 million -- and everyone of us wants/needs food, shelter and clothing. Shortages are occurring in the resources that provide basic necessities ... check the first link ... and we all have heard by now about insufficiency of grain supplies around the globe.
But it is oil that makes the modern world go 'round. You may have plenty of rice in Brazil but if you cannot reasonably afford to ship it to Baton Rouge because the cost of a gallon of diesel fuel is skyrocketing, then there are going to be shortages of supplies where they are needed or shortages of ability to pay.
I still believe that 'knowledge is power' which is the great value in reading and viewing the information imparted here. You will know what is really going on and what is about to happen -- your ability to make wise decisions is therefore greatly enhanced.
Whether a giant crash suddenly plunges us into the abyss or we slide slowly into the post carbon energy world, the important lesson we can take away from the Bartlett lecture and the other items posted here is that it is happening ... now.
These are interesting times. With oil trading above $100/barrel, a larger portion of our national wealth is being spent on the cost of energy.
We are very near or already at what geologists call peak oil. Peak oil is the point at which the maximum rate that oil can be extracted from the earth’s crust can only relentlessly decline from that point forward, due to geological and technological realities. Prior to peak oil it was usually possible to extract as much oil as we needed to meet growing demand while keeping prices relatively low. After peak oil it will be impossible to do that. From now on, oil will become increasingly scarce. The black gold will still be allocated according to price, but as supplies dwindle and prices increase, more and more people will become less affluent, i.e., poorer than they used to be. The age of cheap energy is over. Unfortunately, soon this will be true for all non-renewable resources as well.
This means that our economy, which runs on oil, will not be able to sustain past levels of growth indefinitely, if at all. Pundits on TV are discussing how long it’s going to take before the current recession will turn around and we come out the other side ready for the next round of growth. In my view, this recession is not going to end any time soon and without appropriate leadership it might not end in our lifetimes. The result might easily look like an economy in the middle of a very long slow motion train wreck.
If this sounds like a dire prediction, it doesn't have to be... but it very well might be. Americans, in general, seem averse to contemplating reality. Up until now it’s been easy to get away with it, for as long as energy was cheap we were all free to pursue personal interests and put most everything else out of our minds. But soon reality is going to confront us at every turn. For some, it's already happening.
For example, without cheap oil our food supply will begin to contract. American corporate agriculture runs on oil. It takes oil to prepare the earth, it takes oil to fertilize the fields, it takes oil to harvest the crops, it takes oil to kill the bugs, it takes oil to ship the produce, it takes oil to keep things cold, and it takes oil to cook our food. Meanwhile, bees are dying, bats are dying, while our oceans are being over-fished, polluted with non-biodegradable plastics, and poisoned with PCBs and other chemicals.
Now consider, the cost of fuel is not going to go down except for short-term market fluctuations. Producing energy efficient cars will help, but our oil based, combustion engine based economy, is coming to a close. Replacement technologies are not in place and it takes time to build infrastructure. The longer we delay the development of enlightened energy and transportation strategies, the longer and deeper economic dislocations will be.
A lot of people don’t have much money now and they have less credit and are less credit worthy than they used to be. We are the only industrialized nation with a zero to negative savings rate. Very few industries do not in some way depend on energy and at the same time nearly every corporation in America is committed to growing their profits at double-digit rates. There is not going to be double-digit growth in America. If significant growth occurs it will probably take place in emerging markets but only to the extent that energy allows. In the US, where citizens, government, and corporate executives are somewhat delusional, without society reinventing itself, the economy will decline or stagnate. You can argue these points with me, and I'm always open to it, but in the end, reality will settle the argument.
As corporate executives confront this reality, one can only imagine what kinds of strategies they will use to try to insure their double-digit goals. Their strategies have been evolving for a long time. Look how much effort and money they expend corrupting government policy and officials with their teams of lawyers and lobbyists. Why do they do that? Because they don’t know how to earn double-digit growth legitimately. The only way they can do it is to dip into our pockets and extract our wealth through deceit, corruption and back door government collusion.
Peak oil has been kept a corporate and government secret since 1956. We could have been planning for it all along had not a cadre of corporate and government power brokers diverted our public wealth into their self serving strategies.
So now we have some very severe problems facing us. From government we get lies, secrecy, and obfuscation to prevent what citizens might do if we only understood how we’ve all been cheated.
Officials are not stupid or uninformed… They know and accept that we are in Iraq to control resources. They knew if they had told us what they were up to in the beginning, we wouldn’t have let them get away with defacing the Constitution, murdering a million people and injuring and displacing millions more to take control of the oil. They sugar coat and lie now about almost everything they do. No matter what the politicians tell you, we are not leaving Iraq, at least not until we are sure that we will have certain unfettered access to the oil… or until we have some enlightened leadership.
It’s important to understand this: If we approach these problems with anger, fear, and knee jerk responses, we will surely make things much worse. And yet for an awful lot of people, that will be the initial response to being confronted with, and being awakened by-- reality. The problems we face are solvable. Human beings are capable of great creativity, compassion, and sacrifice. But we can’t solve problems if we are afraid to talk about them, and we can’t manifest a creative environment for developing solutions if we are afraid to tell the truth. The truth about what? In this case, the truth about everything! It should be obvious by now, that you can’t lie about some things and expect that those lies will not eventually poison or corrupt most everything else. The health and well being of every human soul is in some way dependent, interconnected and related to ever other.
We can’t arrive at optimum solutions if we are so afraid to think for ourselves and examine our preconceived ideas and accepted myths. I don’t think we will be able to find meaningful solutions to the problems we face, unless the great majority of us become willing to change our interests, our habits, and our attitudes. This is not going to be easy.
At first, very few politicians, corporate executives, or religious leaders will look kindly on the prospect of examining the delusions and myths we grew up with. In fact they will probably go to any extreme to tell you what I’m saying is just a lot of nonsense. No one who has influence and power over others will want to give it up. But make no mistake… as Dr. Barlett1 says, the problems are all going to get solved… the only question is how painful is it going to be and will these problems get solved with any semblance of compassion, justice and fairness?
If we attempt to look out only for ourselves, we can be pretty sure that’s what others will do too. And if we do that, I can assure you, the suffering will be unprecedented. We are all members of one family. We need to remember that and realize that every one of us has a stake in finding viable solutions, where no one is left out, and where no one will be asked or be required to sacrifice their basic rights or dignity.
To U.S. readers ... this chart means that we have the furthest to fall and we will have the hardest landing.
Oil Production Per Capita -- We peaked years ago by this metric. With greater energy demands coming from growing populations and economies in China and India, the impact of this reality is enormous.
The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See
By Dr. Albert Bartlett
Click on the YouTube link to get to the next parts of this lecture.
Twenty short weeks ago, the world was struggling to digest the idea of $100 US oil.
Today, with oil prices breaching new records almost daily, even ordinarily circumspect soothsayers are talking about the prospect of a super price spike that could cause a run to $200 -- a concept that would have been virtually unthinkable 12 months ago.
And when some of the finest economic minds on the continent -- people like Daniel Yergin, Matthew Simmons and Jeff Rubin -- are willing to openly discuss the permutations and ramifications of life in the shadow of $200 oil, it's hard not to think that a scenario that was once a pipe dream may actually be on the horizon.
After a week in which oil prices set new records daily while passing through two so-called psychological barriers -- $120 and $125 -- before settling in at $125.96 Friday, it's easy to see why the oil bulls are running wild and the bears are nowhere to be found.
"Oil will go through $200 like a hot knife through butter," insisted Simmons, the chairman of investment bank Simmons and Co. International and one of the main champions of the controversial "peak oil" theory, which holds that virtually all of the significant oil pools we are likely to discover have already been found.
Rubin, the outspoken chief economist at CIBC World Markets, has gone so far as to predict oil prices will average $225 a barrel by 2012. Two weeks ago, when he made that call, there were more than a few sniggers around the investment community.
Nobody is laughing today. Since the start of 2008, the price of oil has jumped 25 per cent. Year over year, it has more than doubled.
Not surprisingly given those statistics, oilpatch stocks were also on a tear all week, setting records of their own and pushing the TSX energy index to a year-to- date high of 3941.11 before falling back to end the week at 3922.55.
That oilpatch bellwethers like Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., EnCana Corp. and Suncor Energy Inc. have been rolling out record or near-record first-quarter earnings, and reports that show them to be awash in cash, has only helped fuel the buying frenzy.
Ditto for natural gas prices, up more than 50 per cent since the start of the year and threatening to revisit record highs of their own should summer demand reach anticipated levels. That's a scenario that would produce a so-called "perfect storm" for companies like Canadian Natural, which is heavily gas leveraged but has substantial oil interests and is poised to bring its Horizon oilsands project on stream this summer.
Even unprecedented gasoline pump prices across North America -- not to mention soaring jet fuel and diesel prices -- have been unable to put a damper on the Black Gold Rush of 2008.
Nor, more importantly, have they yet caused consumers to dramatically change their behaviour.
At some point that will happen, insists Yergin, chairman of the prestigious Cambridge Energy Research Associates and one of the most respected energy analysts on the continent.
"Price really matters," Yergin told reporters last week. "It doesn't happen overnight but the laws of economics have not been abolished."
His point is well taken. But clearly, we haven't reached that point -- and hence the renewed conjecture about $200 oil.
Ironically, as OPEC secretary general Abdalla Salem El-Badiri reiterated again last week, there is no shortage of oil in the world.
Nor is there any reason for OPEC, which produces 40 per cent of the world's petroleum, to increase production levels, in spite of U.S. President George W. Bush's promise he will once again ask cartel members to up their output -- a silly political gambit that ignores OPEC's own repeated admissions that it can no longer move global markets or prices at will.
What there is, however, is a widespread fear that geopolitical instabilities could disrupt the flow of oil to consuming nations at any time.
Consider the evidence: Nigeria, the 11th largest oil producer in the world, is in a state of loose anarchy. Iraq, with the fourth-largest reserves in the world, is a war zone. Iran, third-largest reserves in the world, is a powder keg. Venezuela, second most important supplier to the United States after Canada, is at war with international oil companies.
Add in the unfettered consumption of oil by China, India and an emerging Middle East economic bloc, and it becomes apparent that the global dynamics of oil supply and demand are in the midst of an unprecedented restructuring.
As ARC Financial senior economist Peter Tertzakian likes to say, when it comes to oil consumption in the aforementioned countries, their leaders are not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle.
In other words, don't expect a fall-off in the global demand for oil in the months and weeks ahead.
Ultimately, as Yergin argues, when oil prices get high enough, there will be a shift to alternative fuel sources.
But as we've also seen in recent weeks, global shortages in basic foodstuffs caused by the sudden reallocation of agricultural production to biofuels underscores the complications of any widespread move away from oil.
It also serves as a pointed reminder that any meaningful attempt to replace oil as a primary source of energy in the developed world will not happen overnight. In fact, most observers agree it will occur only after an entrenched period of high prices convinces investors that a new world energy (pecking) order must be established.
That equation has not gone unnoticed by global investment fund managers who, knowing a good bet when they see it and anxious to make up for the impact of the devaluation of the U.S. dollar on their portfolios over the past year, are one of the primary forces behind oil's meteoric rise to record heights.
Do all of those considerations pave the way for a run to $200 oil?
The jury is still out. But the betting is heavy that oil prices will almost certainly go markedly higher before they settle or, dare we say it, perhaps even fall back.
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