{"id":271,"date":"2007-08-11T14:24:12","date_gmt":"2007-08-11T14:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/falling-oil-prices\/"},"modified":"2017-09-05T17:54:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T21:54:57","slug":"falling-oil-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/falling-oil-prices\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling Oil Prices"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"left off\" src=\"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/08\/oil-prices.jpg\" alt=oil prices\">I was recently reading in Barron&#8217;s (8\/6\/07) that some people expect the price of oil to drop.  Joel Kurtzman from the Milken Institute thinks that the current prices are not sustainable once Mid-East fears calm down.  Brent Heminger from Total Intelligence Solutions thinks that oil prices will not hit the high of $100 per barrel expected by Goldman Sachs. These people are looking out to 2009 which is surprisingly closer than I ever thought it was.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>What does this do to the alternative energy market, innovation and investment?  If oil falls back to pre-Iraq levels of $33 per barrel (or even to a more realistic $50 per barrel), what will the incentive for pursuing alternative energy be? Is global warming and national security concerns enough to reduce our use of oil?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think it will be. <\/p>\n<p>There will be a slowdown on innovation if this occurs, but maybe some farsighted people will not want to be held randomly hostage to events and work to free us from this.<\/p>\n<p>At best, lower oil prices will give us the time to prepare for a future shortage in oil, and at worse we will squander this time as we have in the past and worsen the environment with more pollution. But I hope that global warming is becoming viewed as a real threat and whether or not it is caused by human activity, I am confident there are things we can do to slow its progress.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n<h3 class='related_post_title'>Related Posts:<\/h3><ul class='related_post'><li>No Related Posts Found! Go find some...<\/li><\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-energy","category-fuels","category-global-warming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10055,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/10055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}