Our Finite World

The supply and demand model of economists suggests that oil prices might rise to consistently high levels, but this has not happened yet:

In my view, the economists’ model of supply and demand is overly simple; its usefulness is limited to understanding short-term shifts in oil prices. The supply and demand model of economists does not consider the interconnected nature of the world economy. Every part of GDP requires energy consumption of some type. The price issue is basically a physics issue because the world economy operates under the laws of physics.

In this post, I will try to explain what really happens when oil supply is constrained.

[1] Overview: Why Oil Prices Don’t Permanently Rise; What Happens Instead

My analysis indicates that there are three ways that long-term crude oil prices are held down:

(a) Growing wage and wealth disparities act to reduce the “demand” for oil. As wage and wealth disparities widen, the economy heads in the direction of a shrinking middle class. With the shrinking of the middle class, it becomes impossible to bid up oil prices because there are too few people who can afford their own private cars, long distance travel, and other luxury uses of oil. Strangely enough, this dynamic is a major source of sluggish growth in oil demand.

(b) Politicians work to prevent inflation. Oil is extensively used in food production and transport. If crude oil prices rise, food prices also tend to rise, making citizens unhappy. In fact, inflation in general is likely to rise, as it did in the 1970s. Politicians will use any method available to keep crude oil prices down because they don’t want to be voted out of office.

(c) In very oil deficient locations, such as California and Western Europe, politicians use high taxes to raise the prices of oil products, such as gasoline and diesel. These high prices don’t get back to the producers of crude oil because they are used directly where they are collected, or they act to subsidize renewables. My analysis suggests that indirectly this approach will tend to reduce world crude oil demand and prices. Thus, these high taxes will help prevent inflation, especially outside the areas with the high taxes on oil products.

Instead of oil prices rising to a high level, I expect that the methods used to try to work around oil limits will lead to fragility in many parts of the economic system. The financial system and international trade are particularly at risk. Ultimately, collapse over a period of years seems likely.

Underlying this analysis is the fact that, in physics terms, the world economy is a dissipative structure. For more information on this subject, see my post, The Physics of Energy and the Economy.

[2] Demand for oil is something that tends not to be well understood. To achieve growing demand, an expanding middle class of workers is very helpful.

Growing demand for oil doesn’t just come from more babies being born each year. Somehow, the population needs to buy this oil. People cannot simply drive up to a gasoline station and honk their horns and “demand” more oil. They need to be able to afford to drive a car and purchase the fuel it uses.

As another example, switching from a diet which reserves meat products for special holidays to one that uses meat products more extensively tends to require more oil consumption. For this type of demand to rise, there needs to be a growing middle class of workers who can afford a diet with more meat in it.

These are just two examples of how a growing middle class will tend to increase the demand for oil products. Giving $1 billion more to a billionaire does not have the same impact on oil demand. For one thing, a billionaire cannot eat much more than three meals a day. Also, the number of vehicles they can drive are limited. They will spend their extra $1 billion on purchases such as shares of stock or consultations with advisors on tax avoidance strategies.

[3] In the US, there was a growing middle class between World War II and 1970, but more recently, increasing wage and wealth disparities have become problems.

There are several ways of seeing how the distribution of income has changed.

Figure 2 shows an analysis of how income (including capital gains) has been split between the very rich and everyone else. What we don’t see in Figure 2 is the fact that total income (calculated in this way) has tended to rise in all these periods.

Back in the 1920s (known as “the roaring 20s”), income was split very unevenly. There was a substantial share of very wealthy individuals. This gradually changed, with ordinary workers getting more of the total growing output of the economy. The share of the economy that the top earners obtained hit a low in the early 1970s. Thus, there were more funds available to the middle class than in more recent years.

Another way of seeing the problem of fewer funds going to ordinary wage earners is by analyzing wages and salary payments as a share of US GDP.

Figure 3 shows that wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP held up well between 1944 and 1970, but they have been falling since that time.

Furthermore, we all can see increasing evidence that young people are not doing as well financially as their parents did at the same age. They are not as likely to be able to afford to buy a home at a young age. They often have more college debt to repay. They are less able to buy a vehicle than their parents. They are struggling to find jobs that pay well enough to cover all their expenses. All these issues tend to hold down oil demand.

Since 1981, falling interest rates (shown in Figure 6, below) have allowed growing wage disparities to be transformed into growing wealth disparities. This has happened because long-term interest rates have fallen over most of this period. With lower interest rates, the monthly cost of asset ownership has fallen, making these assets more affordable. High-income individuals have disproportionately been able to benefit from the rising prices of assets (such as homes and shares of stock), because with higher disposable incomes, they are more able to afford such purchases. As a result, since 1981, wealth disparity has tended to increase as wage disparity has increased.

[4] Governments talk about the growing productivity of workers. In theory, this growing productivity should act to raise the wages of workers. This would maintain the buying power of the middle class.

Figure 4 shows that productivity growth was significantly higher in the period between 1948 and 1970 than in subsequent years. Figure 2 shows that before 1970, at least part of the productivity growth acted to raise the incomes of workers. More recently, productivity growth has been lower. With this lower productivity growth, Figure 2 shows that wage-earners are especially being squeezed out of productivity gains. It appears that most of the growth attributable to productivity gains is now going to other parts of the economy, such as the very rich, the financial sector, and the governmental services sector.

The changes the world has seen since 1970 are in the direction of greater complexity. Adding complexity tends to lead to growing wage and wealth disparities. Figure 4 seems to indicate that with added complexity, productivity per worker still seems to rise, but not as much as when the economic system grew primarily due to growing fossil fuel usage leveraging the productivity of workers.

Figure 4 shows data through June 30, 2025. Note that productivity in the latest period is lower than in earlier periods, even with the early usage of Artificial Intelligence. This is a worrying situation.

[5] The second major issue holding oil prices down is the fact that if crude oil prices rise, food prices also tend to rise. In fact, overall inflation tends to escalate.

Oil is extensively used in food production. Diesel is used to operate nearly all large farm machinery. Vehicles used to transport food from fields to stores use some form of oil, often diesel. Transport vehicles for food often provide refrigeration, as well. International transport, by jet or by boat also uses oil. Companies making hybrid seeds use oil products in their processes and distribution.

Furthermore, even apart from burning oil products, the chemical qualities of petroleum are used at many points in food production. The production of nitrogen fertilizer often uses natural gas. Herbicides and insecticides are made with petroleum products.

Because of these considerations, if oil prices rise, the cost of producing food and transporting it to its destination will rise. In fact, the cost of transporting all goods will rise. These dynamics will tend to lead to inflation throughout the system. When oil prices first spiked in the 1970s, inflation was very much of an issue, both for food and for goods in general. No one wants a repetition of a highly inflationary scenario.

Politicians will be voted out of office if a repetition of the oil price spikes of the 1970s takes place. As a result, politicians have an incentive to hold oil prices down.

[6] Oil prices that are either too high for the consumer or too low for the producer will bring the economy down.

We just noted in Section [6] that oil consumers do not want the price of oil to be too high. There are multiple reasons why oil producers don’t want oil prices to be too low, either.

A basic issue is that the cost of oil production tends to rise over time because the easiest to extract oil is produced first. This dynamic leads to a need for higher prices over time, whether or not such higher prices actually occur. If prices are chronically too low, oil producers will quit.

A second issue is the fact that many oil exporting countries depend heavily on the tax revenue that can be collected from exported oil. OPEC countries often have large populations with very low incomes. Oil prices need to be high enough to provide food subsidies for an ever-growing population of poor citizens in these countries, or the leaders will be overthrown.

Figure 5 shows required breakeven prices for oil producers in the year 2014, considering their need for tax revenue to support their populations, in addition to the direct costs of production. The current Brent Oil price is only about $66 per barrel. If the breakeven price remains at the level shown in 2014, this price is too low for every country listed except Qatar and Kuwait.

No oil exporting country will point out these price problems directly, but they will tend to cut off oil production to try to get oil prices up. In the recent past, this has been the strategy.

OPEC can also try a very different strategy, trying to get rid of competition by temporarily dumping stored-up oil onto the market, to lower oil prices to try to harm the financial results of its export competition. This seems to be OPEC’s current strategy. OPEC knows that US shale producers are now near the edge of cutting back greatly because depletion is raising their costs and reducing output. OPEC hopes that by obtaining lower prices (such as the $66 per barrel current price), it can push US shale producers out more quickly. As a result, OPEC hopes that oil prices will rebound and help them out with their price needs.

I have had telephone discussions with a former Saudi Aramco insider. He claimed that OPEC’s spare capacity is largely a myth, made possible by huge storage capacity for already pumped oil. It is also well known that OPEC’s (unaudited) oil reserves appear to be vastly overstated. These myths make the OPEC nations appear more powerful than they really are. OECD nations, with a desire for a happily ever after ending to our current oil problems, have eagerly accepted both myths.

To extract substantially more oil, the types of oil that are currently too expensive to extract (such as very heavy oil and tight oil located under metropolitan areas) would likely need to be developed. To do this, crude oil prices would likely need to rise to a much higher level, such as $200 or $300 per barrel, and stay there. Such a high price would lead to stratospherically higher food prices. It is hard to imagine such a steep rise in oil prices happening.

[7] The third major issue is that politicians in very oil deficient areas have been raising oil prices for consumers through carbon taxes, other taxes, and regulations.

Strangely enough, in places where the lack of oil supply is extreme, politicians follow an approach that seems to be aimed at reducing what little oil supply still exists. In this approach, politicians charge high taxes (“carbon” and other types) on oil products purchased by consumers, such as gasoline and diesel. They also implement stringent regulations that raise the cost of producing end products from crude oil. California and many countries in Western Europe seem to be following this approach.

With this approach, taxes and regulations of many kinds raise oil prices paid by customers, forcing the customer to economize. Some of the money raised by these taxes may go to help subsidize renewables, but virtually none of the additional revenue from consumers can be expected to go back to the companies producing the oil.

I would expect these high local oil prices will slightly reduce the world price of crude oil because of the reduced demand from areas using this approach (such as California and Western Europe). Demand will be reduced because oil prices will become unaffordably high for consumers in these areas. These areas are deficient in oil supply, so there will be much less impact on world oil supply.

Refineries in China and India will be happy to take advantage of the lower crude oil prices this approach would seem to provide, so much of the immediately reduced oil consumption in California and Western Europe will go to benefit other parts of the world. But the lower oil world oil prices will also act to inhibit future world oil extraction because the development of new oil fields will tend to be restricted by the lower world oil prices.

The lower crude oil prices will be beneficial in keeping world food price inflation and general inflation down worldwide. Some oil may be left in place, in case better extraction techniques are available later, especially in the areas with these high taxes. With less oil supply available, the economies of California and Western Europe will tend to fail more quickly than otherwise.

Unfortunately, so far, these intentionally higher oil prices for consumers seem to be mostly dead ends; they encourage substitutes, but today’s substitutes don’t work well enough to support modern agriculture and long-distance transportation.

[8] Politicians at times have reduced oil demand, and thus oil prices, by raising interest rates.

One way to reduce oil prices has been to push the economy into recession by raising interest rates. When interest rates rise, purchasing power for new cars, and for goods using oil in general, tends to fall. Recession seems to happen, with a lag, as shown on Figure 6. Recessions on this figure are noted with gray bars.

Increasing interest rates has led to several recessions, including the Great Recession of 2007-2009. A comparison with Figure 1 shows that oil prices have generally fallen during recessions.

[9] The climate change narrative is another way of attempting to reduce oil demand, and thus crude oil prices.

The wealthy nations of the world have been spreading the narrative that our most serious problem is climate change. In this narrative, we can help prevent climate change by reducing our fossil fuel usage. This narrative makes trying to work around a fossil fuel shortage a virtue, rather than something that needs to be done to prevent calamity from happening. However, when we examine CO2 emissions (Figure 7), they show that world CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have not fallen because of the climate change narrative.

Instead, what has happened is that manufacturing has increasingly moved to the less advanced economies of the world. There is a noticeable bump in CO2 emissions starting in 2002, as more coal-based manufacturing spread to China after it joined the World Trade Organization in very late 2001.

The climate change narrative has made it possible to “sell” the need to move away from fossil fuels in a less frightening way than by telling the public that oil and other fossil fuels are running out. However, it hasn’t fixed either the CO2 issue or the declining supply of fossil fuels issue, particularly oil.

[10] The danger is that the world economy is growing increasingly fragile because of long-term changes related to added complexity.

Shifting manufacturing overseas only works as long as there is plenty of inexpensive oil to allow long-distance supply lines around the world. Diesel oil and jet fuel are particularly needed. The US extracts a considerable amount of oil, but it tends to be very “light” oil. It is deficient in the long-chain hydrocarbons that are needed for diesel and jet fuel. In fact, the world’s supply of diesel fuel seems to be constrained.

Without enough diesel, there is a need to move manufacturing closer to the end users. But what I have called the Advanced Nations (members of the OECD, including the US, most countries in Europe, and Australia) have, to a significant extent, moved their manufacturing to lower-wage countries. Fossil fuel supplies in countries that have moved their manufacturing offshore tend to be depleted. Trying to move manufacturing back home seems likely to be problematic.

The world economy is now built on a huge amount of debt. All this debt needs to be repaid with interest. But if manufacturing is significantly constrained, there is likely to be a problem repaying this debt, except perhaps in currencies that buy little in the way of physical goods.

When oil supply is stretched, we don’t recognize the symptoms. One symptom is refinery closures in some oil importing areas, such as in California and Britain. This will make future oil supply less available. Other symptoms seem to be higher tariffs (to motivate increased manufacturing near home) and increasing hostility among countries.

[11] Both history and physics suggest that “overshoot and collapse over a period of years” is the outcome we should expect.

Pretty much every historical economy has eventually run into difficulties because its population grew too high for available resources. Often, available resources have been depleted, as well. Now, the world economy seems to be headed in this same direction.

The outcome is usually some form of collapse. Sometimes individual economies lose wars with other stronger economies. Sometimes, wage disparities become such huge problems that the poorer citizens become vulnerable to epidemics. At other times, unhappy citizens overthrow their governments. Or, if the option is available, citizens might vote the current political elite out of power.

Such collapses do not happen overnight; they are years in the making. Poorer people start dying off more quickly, even before the economy as a whole collapses. Conflict levels become greater. Debt levels grow. Researchers Turchin and Nefedov tell us that food prices bounce up and down. There is no evidence that they rise to a permanently high level to enable more food to be grown.

Anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in the Collapse of Complex Societies, tells us that there are diminishing returns to added complexity. While economies can temporarily work around overshoot problems with greater complexity, added complexity cannot permanently prevent collapse.

[12] We need to beware of “overly simple” models.

The models of economists and of scientists tend to be very simple. They do not consider the complex, interconnected nature of the world economy. In fact, the laws of physics are important in understanding how the world economy operates. Energy in some form (fossil fuel energy, human energy, or energy from the sun) is needed for every component of GDP. If the energy supply somehow becomes restricted, or is very costly to produce, this becomes a huge problem.

As I see it, the supply and demand model of economists is primarily useful in predicting what will happen in the very short term. It doesn’t have enough parts to it to tell us much more.

For any commodity, including oil, storage capacity tends to be very low relative to the amount used each year. Because of this, commodity prices tend to react strongly to any fluctuation in presently available supply, or projected supply in the future. The supply and demand model of economists primarily predicts these short-term outcomes.

For the longer term, we need to look to history and to models that consider the laws of physics. These models seem to suggest that collapse will take place over a period of years, as the more vulnerable parts of the system break off and disappear. Unfortunately, we cannot expect long-term high prices to solve our oil problem.