"The U. S. recovery is over. Rest in peace" headlines CNN Money. An economist at UCLA used the "pulse of commerce index" of domestic fuel as a primary indicator that there's no forward momentum left to the post-09 rebound. For their own reasons, lots of other economists, like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Jeff Rubin, are all saying the same thing.

Was it ever a recovery, though? Did we really escape the gravity-well of the 2008 event, the world's first peak global oil shock? Or was this just a brief rebound off the mat before the global economy continues its uneven but inescapable slide down the entropy slope?

If you're at all like me, an irrelevant bystander to history, it's just an idle question. But what if you're someone important in the world today? Or more seriously, (since brain wattage and political power have little necessary correlation that I can see) what if you're someone being well paid to advise important someones in the world today? And of course we include corporations as important personages because the SCOTUS decrees it so. If you're an adviser to the House of Saud, or to Exon, or you report to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, or one of his global counterparts, you might just have some leverage on decisions that direct real money and resources. So where you come down on the question might matter.

The question again is: Are we at a production bottleneck now, in late 2011 or 2012, or, do we have longer? If it is the latter that means that, somehow, as improbable as it sometimes seems, and despite all that's vexing central bankers in Europe, the U. S., China, Japan, and all points in between, the world still has time to invest in a future that runs on something other than hydrocarbons. So do we have until 2018 to double the average fuel economy of the U. S. fleet, to make improvements and cost reductions in electric vehicles, to build mass transit and boost the generating capacity of the grid, and all the million and one other incremental steps necessary to live in a world of declining hydrocarbons? It might just come down to the question, does the global economy have one more good recession left in it?

I'm reading a couple of books right now that I hope will help me understand if such a future is more than chimerical. The one I'll talk about today is Jeff Rubin's, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. I was extremely fortunate to get a copy of the book at Half-Priced books on South Lamar. Rubin's blog is, in my view, a must read for anyone serious about keeping up with energy news. I learn something new there most every post. For example, I have been repeating what I've heard J. H. Kuntsler and lots of others say about the Saudi's being the only entity on the planet with the spare capacity to boost global oil production on short notice. That probably was the case not many years back. But all the data in 2011, says Rubin, suggests that the Saudis are not able to play the role of central bank to global oil liquidity. It's not that they are choosing to stand pat on exports. It is that they are steadily consuming more of what they pump out of the ground each year while their existing fields are steadily declining. The muscular player in the oil patch today is Russia. Russian oil production rose to a near post-Soviet high of 10.26 million barrels a day in May, says Rubin, making Russia the most important oil producer. Indeed, with Saudi either unable or unwilling to increase production, the world would already have been at peak production were it not for Russian exports. And who else is saying Saudi and OPEC have plateaued? Well, when Jim Rogers is saying it on CNN the meme has gone mainstream.