Reality Optional Economics | KUNSTLER

``Recently, John Mauldin predicted that "...pretty soon we're gonna be energy independent... a net energy exporter in the next three, four years." This meme has been all over the web and the mainstream media since about 2011, emitted by commentators who haven't noticed either the steep production declines in shale oil and gas wells or the supernatural flows of junk-derived capital for a drilling frenzy that distracts observers from the financial incongruities of the entire shale energy model (in which the word "profit" is absent)... a week after Mauldin's prediction, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) published a 96% knocked-down revised estimate of recoverable oil from the Monterey/Santos shale formation, going from about 15.4 billion barrels to about 600 million''