Muskiness

Not really. Cuba can trade with the rest of the world. They just don't have much to trade.

They do make good rum, which we can't buy here.

Nonsense. There are plenty of countries that have been happy to trade with Cuba. Canuckistan, for one big example.

Cigars but even the domestic ones are politically incorrect now. Though commie ones to have a certain cache for politicians and interns.

Don't they always creep back down too?

There is a great show on called, "Occupied" about Norway shutting off all the oil and gas because they have built a thorium reactor. But the EU doesn't appreciate the change and allow Russia to occupy Norway to force them to turn the oil back on. Then the Russians don't want to leave so readily.

From the anthropogenic climate change perspective, that has to be true. Of course, when we outgrow getting our energy by burning fossil carbon, oil an d gas will be a great resource for the chemical industry - loads of relativ ely short chain hydrcarbons, very handy as building blocks for more useful and more complex chemicals.

And you've got some idea of the size of the Saudi oil reserves?

They've got 60 years production in the ground at the current rate of extrac tion.

It's fairly clear how long they can keep up their current rate of productio n. The world market for oil is less easily predictable.

John Larkin's capacity to "figure" isn't impressive.

cash-2016-2

The Arab world needs to work out a less expensive way of running their coun tries. Fighting small wars is about the most expensive form of political ne gotiation you can imagine, and they have a lot of motivation to work out ho w to do better.

in-crisis/

As if the UK DailY Telegraph were worth reading. I did try to glance at it, but the web-site wanted me to turn off Ad-Blocker, which would take more e ffort than I'm prepared to exert to get access to the kind of half-baked ri ght-wing nonsense that the Telegraph has been serving up in recent decades.

The Norwegians have been investing the profits in a sovereign wealth fund. The UK hasn't been that clever.

If you'd read the articles at the end of the links, you'd be aware that the re is lots of shale oil in China, and that they haven't been all that enter prising about getting at it, though they may be raising their game now.

China's usual way of engineering a more US-style mix is to tolerate US-leve l corruption.

hinas-sputtered

China is communist, not socialist. It is run by the Communist Party, for th e benefit of the members of the communist party. The socialists threw out M arx and the proto-communists in 1870 because they could see how this could go wrong - as it did.

Socialism is a democratic movement and - when it works properly (and gettin g that right has taken a while) - it does as much as is practical for every body.

This doesn't turn out to be a rigorous leveling down - there are rich and p oor in all successful socialist countries, though the poor are unusually we ll looked after, and the rich aren't as much richer as they are in less ega litarian countries.

The Nordics will have enough backlog to fly wheel through to the next peak. They've done it before.

ty-in-crisis/

it, but the web-site wanted me to turn off Ad-Blocker, which would take mo re effort than I'm prepared to exert to get access to the kind of half-bake d right-wing nonsense that the Telegraph has been serving up in recent deca des.

The British Broadcasting Corporation isn't perfect, but back when I had the opportunity to compare their outputs, they were a whole lot better than th e Daily Telegraph.

The BBC's mandate is to inform the whole country, and the Daily Telegraph w as designed to dole out maintenance doses of right-wing rubbish to committe d conservatives and outright reactionaries.

Nobody else would bother buying the Daily Telegraph - they routinely left o ut details that wouldn't have appealed to their right-wing readers, so thei r policy would have been "half the news that's fit to print".

John Larkin isn't actually a Daily Telegraph reader - granting his broad-sp ectrum ignorance he probably doesn't qualify as a reader at all - but his g oogle searches do seem to find a lot of the kind of right-wing misinformati on that appeals to him on the Daily Telegraph web-site.

"flywheel"? Peak? Enough what?

Enough cash.

Nobody is going to forget how to frack. And the former oil giants - the Saudis, Venezuala, the north sea boys, are bleeding cash.

Norway at least saved some cash for times like these. But it won't last forever.

Ah, that makes sense. I was reading it is that they had enough oil, so it made no sense.

• Connection Interrupted

The document contains no data.

The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

rashes/

Robert Baer, we already know that you are a technical half-wit who couldn't find his backside with both hands.

Getting data from the Watt's-up-with-that denialist website isn't difficult - denialist propaganda is freely available to anybody silly enough to pay attention to it - so if you can't get access to it, your system must be roy ally screwed up, which is really not information that any of the rest of us either need or want.