True Prosperity

True Prosperity

by Chris Martenson 

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Executive Summary

• Why once you understand the oil situation, you understand how systemic change is inevitable
• Why to expect a major financial crisis this year
• Why now is the best time to understand what true prosperity is (beyond just money), and how it should shape your priorities in advance of the coming changes
• Our guidance on where to focus your efforts most for the greatest returns

Part I: The Trouble with Money

If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Part II: True Prosperity

In understanding material wealth, the role of energy — and particularly oil, in today’s world — is hard to underestimate. 

Primary Wealth

This point cannot be made often enough: Oil is responsible for everything we see around us.

This means that oil is responsible for most everything we might think is delivered by our economy. Which means that oil is the source of nearly all wealth.

As Gregor Macdonald recently penned for us in an excellent report: 

Now that energy data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) in Washington is even harder to locate, given the rolling budget cuts over the past four years, it has strangely become an even more exciting quest to see what bombs they drop in their data sets, as the “news” there goes completely unannounced to the public.

I was quite gobsmacked, to say the least, to discover this week that the EIA released revisions covering the past 10 years of global oil production data and lowering global oil production for almost every year going back to 2001. In some of these recent years, in which we actually touched 74 mbpd of global production, it had appeared for over 12 to 18 months that we might have a chance to record a statistically meaningful new high in annual production. But given the revisions this week, that is no longer the case.

What is really remarkable about this data is that it means the world has essentially not increased its supply of crude oil for going on seven years now, despite a tripling in price.