While oil will keep going up until at least 2006

Oh, there'll be ups and downs, but the long term trend is up, up, up.

Yes, part of ihe story is peak oil, about which nobody's doing anything yet.

But the main reason oil will continue to go through the roof is Iraq.

Some points:

• America's energy policy at the business end has always been pretty savage: from killing off lots of whales, to enslaving coal miners, America has always turned a blind eye towards the ruthless extraction of energy to fuel economic growth. You could include slavery too, in that I suppose.
  
  
• Jimmy Carter- speaking honestly - declared the middle east an area of "strategic importance" to the US- which it was and is at the moment: dry up the oil, and we're screwed big time; and this time it won't be somebody doing an embargo on a whim (which was billed as being peed at Israel but actually had something to do with being paid off in worthless dollars).
  
  

This time it is about our very hegemony in the region that's at stake: our task is either to make Iraq a stable, prosperous, "Germany-like" (that is, the Germany of today) American "friend" or - or- give up the very way of life as we've known it for about 60 years.

Now... how likely do you reallythink that Iraq will be "Germany-like?" How about Saudi Arabia?

See where I'm heading?

The whole world knows, dammit, that our Achilles heel is cheap oil at the hands of religious fundamentalists and people who've been screwed by our policy of coddling dictators.

They're not likely to turn into "Germany-like" overnight.

So oil is going up, up, and away.

It was better to let sleeping Saddam Hussiens lie if ther wasn't an exit strategy from imported oil.

Period.