Mainstream?

What does mainstream mean anyway?

From wikipedia:

Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. It was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, although mass media was present centuries before the term became common. The term public media has a similar meaning: it is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment across mediums such as newspapers, television, radio, broadcasting, which require union membership in large markets such as Newspaper Guild and AFTRA, & text publishers. The concept of mass media is complicated in some internet media as now individuals have a means of potential exposure on a scale comparable to what was previously restricted to select group of mass media producers. These internet media can include television, personal web pages, podcasts and blogs.

The communications audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda. The term "MSM" or "mainstream media" has been widely used in the blogosphere in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

From Money Week:

Matt Drudge has just taken Peak Oil mainstream.

Up until today, you could randomly ask 10 people on the street what “Peak Oil” is and you’d get a blank stare from at least nine of them. I’d wager that as of yesterday, Drudge himself would have been among that vast majority.

Up until today, the idea that there’s only a finite amount of oil in the world that can be recovered, and that once you reach the halfway point there begins an irreversible decline, simply hasn’t been in most people’s awareness.

Of course, geologists and oil industry insiders have been familiar with it. Whiskey & Gunpowder readers are certainly familiar with it. And so is a subset of Lexus liberals who like Peak Oil because it dovetails nicely with their Malthusian and anti-capitalist worldview.

But all of a sudden, awareness of Peak Oil is spreading exponentially. It started today, and will only grow from here.

wikipedia

Scientific American

Wall Street Journal

CBC

Telegraph

National Geographic

World Oil

US Army

Forbes

Shell Oil

Washington Monthly

New York times

CNN

MoneyWeek

Popular Mechanics

MSNBC

USA Today

Financial Sense

Christian Science Monitor

Huffington Post

Exxon

So... has Peak oil gone mainstream?

Ummm... yeah... it has.

'Nuff said.

Positive feedback for oil prices

Often overlooked in the grand scheme of things, is the dependency of oil producers on their own products.

We tend to look at the downstream effect of higher oil prices on the various markets which are dependent on the products refined from oil. If this logic is correct, that as oil's price soars higher the price of these products which depend on oil also rise, then the same logic must hold true for oil production itself.

This feedback loop means that as oil becomes more expensive it becomes even more expensive to locate, extract & produce that oil. Which in turn, causes even higher oil prices, which again raises the cost of oil production.

You get the idea...

This compounding effect becomes more & more pronounced the higher the relative price of oil climbs, creating a cascading effect which will eventually lead to price "super-spikes" where large jumps in price may happen very quickly compared to traditional inflation.

Because markets can't adjust quickly to these super-spikes, the potential for collapse of markets becomes a realistic fear as oil continues it's meteoric climb skyward.

Your dog wants blissful ignorance.

China Becomes A BP Shareholder

HONG KONG -

China has quietly accumulated nearly a 1% stake in BP to help secure its oil supply to fuel rapid economic growth. The silent investment from China has come to the attention of Downing Street, which has been monitoring the situation carefully.

A Chinese sovereign wealth fund has purchased about 1 billion pounds ($2 billion) worth of BP (nyse: BP - news - people ) over a period of time, accounting for just less than 1% of the U.K.'s biggest enterprise. "We are aware of the Chinese holding and we welcome all shareholders," a spokesperson for BP said, confirming the investment without identifying which Chinese state fund had bought the stake, the Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday. Although the British government may publicly welcome the Chinese state fund's investment, the newspaper noted that all parties on Downing Street are keeping a close eye on developments.

U.K. Chancellor Alistair Darling is in Beijing this week for talks to tighten Sino-British economic links. He is speaking with Chinese government officials including Lou Jiwei, chairman of the China Investment Corp., the sovereign wealth fund that manages $200 billion, about 12% of China’s foreign exchange reserves. China Investment Corp., which invested $3 billion in Blackstone (nyse: BX - news - people ) last summer before the U.S. investment firm listed its shares on Wall Street, is not the company buying into BP, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Xinhua Financial Network News in Beijing said Tuesday that the buyer is actually SAFE Investment Co., a Hong Kong-registered investment vehicle of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which had already bought a 1.6% stake, worth around 1.8 billion euros ($2.9 billion), in France's Total (nyse: TOT - news - people ), the third-largest oil company in Europe. (See: "China Takes A Piece Of Total")

China's foreign exchange reserves hit $1.68 trillion at the end of March, the People's Bank of China, reported last week. In an effort to keep its rapidly expanding economy humming along, China boosted its crude oil production to 30.8 million metric tons during the first two months of this year, the National Development and Reform Commission disclosed earlier this month. But that constituted just a 1.2% rise from 2007; China will not achieve energy independence any time soon. Meanwhile, crude oil imports rose 9.5%, to 28.23 million metric tons, according to the agency. Still, shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel caused public discontent in some areas of the country.

To secure stable import supplies, China has been granting loans to oil-exporting countries in Africa such as Nigeria over the past few years. Investing in BP and other Western oil companies is seen as another way to raise China's bargaining power as a big importer.

News!

Running With the Bulls: EIA Says $100 Oil “New Norm”

Posted by Keith Johnson

Chalk up another convert from the oil bear camp: The U.S. Energy Information Administration has given up on seeing double-digit oil prices this year, and says $100 oil—and loads of volatility in crude markets—is the “new norm.” That’s a sudden shift from the $87 barrel of oil the EIA was forecasting in January.

They’ve got company. (Associated Press)

What gives? For the U.S. energy agency, sustained high oil prices can’t be solely attributed to financial speculation, as many analysts insist. But it’s not entirely a supply shortfall either, though excess capacity is tight. Rather, it’s a double-whammy of increasing oil consumption in developing economies and greater domestic consumption in oil-exporting countries that offsets U.S. belt-tightening during the slowdown. Notes Neil King in the WSJ (sub reqd.):

Oil demand continues to grow briskly in China, India and Russia, where fuel prices are heavily subsidized. In the Middle East, soaring energy needs and shortfalls in natural-gas supplies mean major exporters such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates must use more oil at home. The EIA predicts that even with falling consumption in the U.S., oil demand world-wide will jump by 1.2 million barrels a day this year.