Comments on: People Somewhat Optimistic About The Possibility of $100 Oil

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:50:03 +0000

Good call, Nostradamus. LOL.

By: Brian Carr

Brian Carr — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:14:38 +0000

Peggy, the price of oil and the price of gasoline don’t move in unison.

By: peggy whitt

peggy whitt — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:06:15 +0000

Yesterday gas was $1.559 today its up to $1.659
What happened oil was $40.00 a barrel this morning .

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:19:57 +0000

I can’t believe how plain stupid this column was. Oil is sitting at the $40 per barrel level as I type this, not 6 months after this column was written.

Take an econ class you fool. Rush Limbaugh was predicting $90 oil by January back when oil hit $145. Looks like he estimated conservatively.

By: Gaius Obvious

Gaius Obvious — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:13:52 +0000

“I found it kind of staggering that over 40% of respondents think $100 oil will have at least one last hurrah. (Full disclosure – I don’t think oil will ever close below $120 again, let alone $100.)”

Well, today (21 October 2008) crude oil closed at $66 a barrel.
I think you need to reassess your opinion of the wisdom of the crowd and the reasons you didn’t see the oil price bubble which was obviously based more on speculation than on demand because demand hasn’t dropped more than 50% yet the price has.

By: Rob

Rob — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:29:01 +0000

Well, not really. Only if you consider that you can knock it down and rebuild, but that doesn’t create more real estate. In a world with increasing population, dividing habitable land area by population gives, for example, ft^2/person. This gets smaller as the denominator rises. Ft^2 is fixed, unless you contemplate increasing the radius of the earth by building upward.

All that said, I don’t disagree with your fundamental hypothesis.

By: Brian Carr

Brian Carr — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:45:42 +0000

Eh, yes and no. If you’re talking strictly about land, yes, you are correct in that it is a finite resource. However, the recent real estate bubble was centered around residential and commercial building, both of which are infinite resources (theoretically).

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:21:01 +0000

While I agreed with your assessment of the likelihood of sub-$100/barrel oil, there is a flaw in one of your analogies. You describe a parallel between a perceived “oil bubble” and the so-called real estate/housing bubble in the opinions of those who believe that oil prices will fall similarly to housing prices. You then point out that oil is a finite resource and, once used up, it is gone forever.

The same is true of real estate; as Will Rogers famously said, “they ain’t making any more of it.” Admittedly, real estate can be used indefinitely rather than used up, but only if population doesn’t increase. That has only happened during massive catastrophic dieoffs (think black plague). Of course, such a massive catastrophic dieoff is precisely what the so-called “peak oil gloomers” predict.