[Kiboru]

What do you think will happen when oil reaches 200-300$?

[Kiboru]

And exactly when do you predict that will happen???

Well I don't know when, I just wonder what people think will happen when it does.

[StormBringer]

Personally when and if that ever gets to be that price. One thing is for sure.....................WW3..................

I doubt any country with the power to take what they want will ever be held hostage to the point of $300 a barrel prices.......for long anyway................

[steam_cannon]

What do you think will happen when oil reaches 200-300$?

If what we've recently seen is any indication, probably Demand Destruction.
People losing their jobs or earning less and then traveling less and
buying less manufactured goods. To put things in perspective, if you
don't have a job then a buck fifty is too high a price for a gallon of gas.
So though I think $300 a barrel is possible, things may not play out that way.
We may never see $300 a barrel. I think a lot of it depends on how
inflation goes and how bad factors like the economic slowdown gets.

By the way, that's not to say demand destruction is necessarily pretty
such as people collecting unemployment, eating in soup lines or
people being productive and growing their own potatoes.
Demand destruction could also result in war or jobless Zombie Hords.
We do love the thought of Zombie Hords here at PO.com

[idiom]

If we couldn't sustain $147 with all the pretend money we had, how will we sustain a higher price without it?

Oil production would have to decline faster than our available credit. Available credit is disapperaing somewhat faster than say 4% per year.

[Hermes]

Kiboru:

There are a number of other threads on this board discussing the question of "What will life be like when oil is up to XXX dollars per gallon?"

My personal takeaway from the discussions, and seeing what happened earlier in 2008 is along the lines of what steam_cannon and idiom are essentially saying: It may never actually get up that high.

Now that's not because oil won't be scarce, or the true value of oil is that high, etc... it's because the market will be in such profound turmoil at that point and the global economy will be so berzerk, that the dollar amount placed on oil might not even be such a good indicator of its actual value and availability in the world.

[mos6507]

I don't think things were that bad at $147. I mean, it wasn't Mad Max. Was it painful? Yeah, but people were getting by. If $150 had been sustained, I'm sure some permanent changes were going to be made. People would reinsulate their houses, downsize their cars, carpool, take the bus, etc... Instead, a great many people kind of just bitched and moaned, cut all disgressionary travel and spending during the oil spike rather than making permanent adaptations. Now, if oil proceeded onwards to $300 I think we'd be in for serious trouble unless we were already well into transitioning off of oil, but we could certainly get by on oil at $100-125. That price would have provided enough of a chronic pain in people's pocketbooks to act as a catalyst for mitigation.

[eastbay]

What do you think will happen when oil reaches 200-300$?

A recession, maybe?

Ok, poor joke... but seriously, one thing we know for certain is that the oil service sector stocks, funds, and ETF's will surpass their June '08 highs. Other than that, it will mostly be unhappy news for people.

Oh, another thing we know for certain is that it WILL happen. The only question is when... but sooner than later most likely. All it will take is a small shortage.

[efarmer]

It seems we either have to be duped into being prematurely
uncomfortable in time to have a shot at mitigation or else we
just have to crash in an obvious and self explanatory fashion
and see what emerges from the chaotic soup, this after
all is one of our strong suits to date as a species.
Could will always suck compared to did, and threats
are best sold by disasters.

My favorite idiom of 2008 was the return of the Titanic
meme, "Too Big to Fail", which I believe was actually a
beloved slogan among the dinosaurs. The clue to our
resource limits scenario is the we deemed various financial
entities as "Too Big to Fail" after they failed. This is our evolution
from doing so prematurely on the Titanic and looking foolish.

It is tough sledding when you are trying to sell resource
limit mitigation to a populace that would rather buy post
disaster heroes and miracle stories.