I heard the other day that my friend Jim Mott was on the Today Show, so I tracked it down and you can see the clip here. Jim is one of the few people I know who actually makes his living solely as an artist, and has done so for the last 20 some-odd years.

Aside from being a great painter, he’s also the person that turned me onto global warming as having a real effect (swans in upstate New York) and Diet for a New America.

One Sunday morning I was in the studio working. I was about to have an opening and wanted to get in touch with Jim, but didn’t have an e-mail address and I hadn’t seen him for a while, and didn’t even know if he was in town. Just then there was a knock on the door and there he stood! He’d been teaching using the space next door.

I’m glad to see him get some recognition after many years of hard work- huzzah!

So WTI One-month futures hit $100 today for the first time. The end to Jerome’s countdown series. So I went back and read his second post from June 2005, which included this quote from a CERA study:

The balance of supply over demand has the potential to expand significantly over the next five years, and this could drive oil prices to the downside. If demand growth averages a relatively strong 2.2% through 2010, prices could weaken from recent record highs and slip well below $40/bbl as 2007-08 nears. If demand growth were notably weaker, a steeper price fall would be conceivable; however such a fall would likely slow capacity expansion and bring a market rebalance within two to three years.

I looked at another historic EIA (eia.doe.gov) report from around the same time predicting we would be seeing $50 prices by now. Obviously these predictions are whacked. I can’t find specific demand figures, but only China and Russia seem to be above the 2.2% growth estimate here. What didn’t happen is all the additional supply coming online that was supposed to, assumed to. Maybe the Peak Oilers are onto something…