Gas & fish & stuff

Some local shrimper was heard to say that when the price of a gallon of diesel was greater than the price of a pound of shrimp at the fish-house it was time to park the boat, a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. From the London Evening Standard:

Worldwide protests over the rising price of fuel escalated today, with the Philippines presidential palace besieged by lorries, fishermen burning their boats in Thailand, and Spanish petrol stations running dry as haulers blockade major roads.

and deeper in the story:

One [Thai] fishermen's group said more than half of the 50,000 fishing boats under its wing are being kept ashore because of the high cost of diesel.

Read all the Brit story here.
The OPEC nabobs met and muttered something about producing a little more and it's all the fault of speculators. There is good reason to doubt promises of substantially more production on the excellent grounds that Saudi Arabia doesn't have the oil to pump. The predictable crowd is working itself into a predictable frenzy to drill offshore and in ANWR, a mere ameliorative whose benefit won't be delivered for many years, but one that fits with the conspiratorial world view of the predictable crowd. People really don't wanna get their heads around the idea that things have changed profoundly all of a sudden. Just heard an oil guy on TV say that yeah, maybe in ten or fifteen years we would see peak oil. My wife observes that must mean we're at that point right now; I tend to believe that we've already passed it.