Crude Oil Appears to Touch $100 a Barrel

I just read in the Wall Street Journal that crude oil appears to touch $100 a barrel.

$100 barrels of oil are inevitable. This century is going to be the century about solving our energy problems and our addiction to fossil fuels. The whole mess about offshoring, outsourcing and globalization will barely merit a blip 100 years from now when we reflect back upon the 21st century... it will be about Energy and the innovation of a new renewable, sustainable, clean energy source and how it was developed and discovered and our planet retooled to distribute it.

Thus this century will make those involved in the development of this new NEXT "Next Big Thing" enormously wealthy. Oil companies will reinvent themselves to become energy companies... we already see the signs that they understand that they must lead this path to a new power source.

Oil will continue to climb as demand and competition wrestle with the needs of those that can afford it and those that cannot afford this diminishing diet of highly expensive energy.

What this means to my colleagues in economic development is increased pressure on the cost of human capital in the production of goods. Energy costs China and other nations the same approximately as it costs here in the USA. This means in order to lower costs the cost of labor is a source of savings. This will continue to give strong pressure on the blue collar and manufacturing elements of the economy to reduce over-all costs by considering offshoring and outsourcing of any viable cost reduction projects that affect their over-all cost of goods produced. Economic Developers will need to sharpen their pencils and create hybrid tools to offset this human capital advantage in offshore climates by lowering their own cost of doing business in their locales. As I have always said, the globalism war is fought mostly at the local level. In my book, "Who Moved My Smoke Stack?", I discuss possible solutions to begin to address these challenges.