Our Finite World | Exploring how oil limits affect the economy

Summary: We live in a conflict-filled world today. I believe that this is ultimately a “not-enough-to-go-around” problem. Hidden oil shortages are the problem. Strangely, at this stage in the economic cycle, oil shortages seem to appear as high interest...

World crude oil extraction reached an all-time high of 84.6 million barrels per day in late 2018, and production hasn’t been able to regain that level since then.
Oil prices have bounced up and down over the ten-year period 2014 to 2024 (Figure2).
In this post, I show that changing oil prices have had varying impacts on production. Recently, lower prices seem to be associated with lower production because extraction has become less profitable for producers. A temporary spike in oil prices does...

Where could the economy be headed now?
Today, there is great wage and wealth disparity, just as there was in the late 1920s. Recent energy consumption growth has been low, just as it was in the 1920s. A significant difference today is that the debt level of the US government is already at...

The world economy is an amazingly complex, physics-based, self-organizing system. The three major elements are extracted resources including energy resources, human population, and demand coming through the financial system.
All three of these elements tend to increase over time, but both population and extracted resources tend to hit limits because the world is finite. Financial demand is emphasized by politicians because it seems to increase without limit. The extraction...