America's Feel-Good Oil Bonanza - A Dangerous Policy Addiction or Renewed Prosperity?

Daniel Lerch presents a solid critique of the recently released Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2014 (AEO 2014), which foresees impending and long-term US oil abundance as not just surprising—but a dangerous return to a 2004 way of thinking.  That critique can be a much needed corrective for the smart money's and professionals' embrace of the bonanza as a newly discovered profitable, common-sense, no-brainer bridge to an easier longer-term transition to renewable energy. Instead, it may be a siren call that could crash the economy onto the rocky shoals of ever-escalating energy costs and irreversible climate change with its potentail catastrophic impacts.

Think back to early 2004. Oil cost around $40 per barrel1—on the high side compared to the previous few decades but not much out of the ordinary. Gasoline still cost under $2.00 a gallon for most of the country. The evening news was more concerned with wardrobe gaffes by Janet Jackson (too little, at the Super Bowl) and President Bush (too much, on the USS Abraham Lincoln) than with energy prices. In retrospect, these were the last days of "normal."... 

Read the rest at:  http://www.postcarbon.org/article/2038833-america-s-feel-good-oil-bonanza. 

Jan. 20, 2014, Daniel Lerch,Publications Director, Post Carbon Institute