This story appeared just now, how oil prices dropped by a large amount again today. West Texas Intermediate has dropped below US$20 for the first time in 18 years. Canadian Tar Sands Oil is essentially worthless right now (click on the picture to read the article):
It's not that we didn't see this coming. Demand has plummeted. People aren't driving, not traveling and planes aren't flying.
Coincidentally, I was listening to a podcast from one of my favourite shows, Freakonomics. The podcast was called "Does Anyone Really Know What Socialism Is?" If you follow this link, you can either read a full transcript or listen to the podcast. It's quite interesting.
What caught my attention was when the podcast started talking about Venezuela and how it had become so dependent on oil a few decades ago and how that was causing problems now (and it wasn't even talking about the current disaster for energy resources). No, the talk was about how some have decided to brand Venezuela as a "socialist" country. What socialism actually is. What damage dependence on one volatile resource can cause for a country.
And then, for contrast, the podcast moved on to compare Venezuela's experience with that in Norway and Sweden. Remember that this podcast was about socialism, not oil prices. And they talked about Bernie Sanders. Apparently not even Bernie gets it right. What he's talking about isn't socialism. The take home message here, among others, is that socialism isn't social democracy.
Worth listening to and thinking about. There's not much that can be done in the middle of a pandemic to sort problems like these, but when we come out the other side, there should be a discussion about future directions, specifically our continued insistence on developing a resource that has so much price volatility and insisting that a single such resource underpin so much of any economy. And that's not to even mention all the other problems those resources cause.
Isolation Manor, Out.
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