We are in the midst of one already, Klare says.

Question: What would it take to trigger an oil crisis?

Michael Klare: We are having an oil crisis today. It’s going to get worse. I think that we have a situation today where is the result of higher demand, which is produce by growing competition for oil from between the older industrial powers on one hand and the rising powers like China on the other hand, and slow down in this supply are discuss at and the inability of the oil industry to pump out more, but we could have other factors making this situation even more severe. We could have another bad hurricane season, like we had with Katrina and that’s likely given global warming and the intensification of severe storm activity in the Gulf of Mexico or we could have a war with Iran, which Vice President Cheney seems determine to trigger or some other crisis in oil producing country, Nigeria for example or somewhere else, that would double the price of oil from what we have today. Either any of the combination of those, if two or three of them happened simultaneously will be in very bad shape.

Recorded: 3/14/08