Front Page Sunday NY Times

I woke up to this article above the fold, right hand side of the paper:

Oil-Rich Nations Use More Energy, Cutting Exports

The first paragraph lays it out pretty well:


The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast that their need for energy within their borders is crimping how much they can sell abroad, adding new strains to the global oil market.

I realize this is not the kind of thing that we in our everyone be happy, celebrity and sports crazed society want to contemplate, but we better start. The Vice-President might believe that our way of life is non-negotiable, but without cheap, abundant crude I see the need for a lot of negotiation.

You can't make it any clearer than Amy Myers Jaffe does:

"It is a very serious threat that a lot of major exporters that we count on today for international oil supply are no longer going to be net exporters any more in 5 to 10 years,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an oil analyst at Rice University.

We in the US are in the process of getting hit with a massive devastating one-two punch and the masses don't even see it coming. Our consumer-centric debt ridden system is trying to get up from a shot to the chin called a credit crunch and will soon have to absorb a left hook in the form of much much higher energy costs, combined with less supply. For a nation that imports 60% or so of its' crude-oil needs I'd say we have some thinking to do.