Gregor on the SPR release: Pay Attention

Two fundamentally different stories have been enacted

…during the lifetime of man.

One began... some two or three million years ago by the Leavers,

and is still being enacted by them today, as successfully as ever.

The other began to be enacted here some ten or twelve thousand years ago

by the Takers,

and is apparently about to end in catastrophe.

Ishmael, a wise fictional gorilla

…the IEA inventory release implies that whatever extra supply Saudi Arabia can offer,
it is either too sour and heavy to bring down the price of global diesel,
or Saudi can only pump extra oil for short periods of time.

…both of these factors are in play.

We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization

in which people have dared to think it practicable

to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.

Arnold Toynbee

Releases of oil from inventory are counterintuitively bullish, not bearish, for prices.

While oil prices no doubt will be rocked for several months now,
releases such as these only highlight the fundamental problem at hand:
structurally restrained supply.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race

is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Dr Albert Bartlett

For example, the OECD could have turned to non-OPEC producers
…and asked them to produce more.

But Non-OPEC producers, accounting for 57% of total global supply,
have no spare capacity.

The major advances in civilization

are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Alfred North Whitehead

The oil market is going to figure this out more quickly than most imagine.

…Release of inventory is confirmation that the era of permanently constrained supply
is now very much with us.

Because industrial economies are simply machines that convert energy inputs
into useful work and services, today’s action is also a reminder
that the dream of higher growth in conjunction with lower oil prices
is now very much a backward looking view,
a nostaglia for a past that’s no longer possible.

Gregor

All progress

is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every organism

to live beyond its income.

Samuel Butler