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Walking through the most precarious times, with Present’ that is gloomier and Future more murky. We are already soaked into the torrents of meltdowns and ruination while augur the clouds of dearth and wrangle. Courses and resources, population and pollution, ideologies and religion, affluent and deficient’ all steaming up to become a perilous fusion’ getting ready to explode’ all at once. We can see the portending clouds heading right in our direction while we stand, forecast and yet prepare for nothing except’ to wrangle our acquittal through the quagmire of economic liquefaction. Thus we stand to embrace yet another era of struggle and scuffle spreading over an age confined only by perpetual imagination…
Every ensuing issue incarcerates a dilemma for human race’ while holding potential for a major spill over and disaster. Population explosion would ultimately dilate the sparking gap between have and have nots, while ensuing the potential for conflicts’ be ethnic or ideological. More the us’ genesis more the need and greed, requiring more land, resources, energy and capacity’ thus paving way for extra consumption, wastage, pollution and deterioration. Already’ we are into heated debates about reservoirs and rivers, age of peak oil, struggle for minerals and land grabs for dwellers. Mother earth for the first time in her billion year existence is perceiving ineffectuality in meeting demands of her inhabitants, who are becoming more of parasite then symbiotic. Can we survive this ruthless journey? We can’t cope with insufficient; can we cope with the absolute Nothing?
Opening Pandora with the imminent energy calamity…
Just like the lending spree that lead to mortgage fiasco and hence an economic turmoil, $40 per barrel also ticks as a stemming time bomb that when explode’ would shiver the substratum of freshly healed global economy! Fall of the Green Back lead the gates for massive investment to flow into the commodity souk, letting oil to stroke unimaginable ceilings, though it has fallen to new depths since but that tumultuous period broke the already fractured global economy’ hit hard by the ruptured mortgage bubble. The spike in oil prices lead those countries who other wise could have survived the global economic seizure’ to bankruptcies because of the massive imbalance of payments. The soaring prices acted as a stumbling breaker that flattened the momentum of an already ruptured engine that had lost its steam by the mortgage detonation. No doubt’ the sudden spike acted as a catalyst in intoxicating the whole system but on the other hand it boosted leverage of energy industry that suddenly saw massive capital flow for advancing exploration and development of under and undeveloped fields. In this close system of ours’ dilemma for one is a boon for other, and so is the other way round!
As we stand today on $50 ground’ the situation is equally perplexing, artificial and unsustainable as the previous one. Firstly’ damage the spike had done was acute enough to knock off the consuming impetus out of the system, strengthen by the collapse of financial order, thus no matter how thin the price gets’ its not going to comfort the pain of credit squeeze. Secondly’ every single day where the price stays, makes our future ache! Each dollar below the 70 threshold strains our future energy exploratory endeavor, thus defying present while dashing our future. Its been more then a decade that global oil consumption outstripped supplies, we consume more then discover, even if we discover’ the uncover barrel costs more to explore, gouge, process and dispatch then ever before. Three decades have passed since a field been explored to produce million barrel a day…But the real showdown would begin the moment global economy would bounce back, when demand would severely outstrip all previous supplies and capacity incapable to meet the desired urgency.
Muhammad Shafqat
Mar 2009
