Gas pains and the Commodore’s bikini babes

I’m fresh out of good economic news this week (sorry), so any whistling you hear isn’t my puckered kisser blowing a happy tune. It is, by contrast, the whistle of an energy bomb that just might blow up the few remaining parts of the economy that we forgot to dismantle on our own.

Indeed: We might be flirting with a comprehensive energy crisis here.

As in…the specter of electric rates here climbing heavenwards, which would put more businesses on a snowball in hell footing.

As in…gas for your T-100 getting even more expensive.

As in…airlines getting stung by higher fuel costs.

As in…our own Uncle Sam wheezing from the economic effects of a pending energy crunch.

As in (gee, does this ever end?) industrial Asia (our source of tourists) getting pole axed by one and the same energy crunch.

We don’t produce energy here, so we’re merely beholden to the machinations of the outside world. The reality out there can be cruel: our counterparts in the United States are already paying as much at two bucks a gallon for their automotive go-juice at the pump for high octane.

Oil inventories over there are way down. And I won’t even mention the so-stupid-and-awful-it-was-unthinkable-but-it-happened-anyway energy crisis in the People’s Republic of California. Hey, if it hits the fan there, it can sure hit the fan here.

The smart folks are starting to worry, and the dummies aren’t worried at all…which really raises the red flag in the atrophied folds of my cognitive cranial organ.

If I was one of those big-picture, geopolitical thinkers, I’d wonder aloud if maybe this wouldn’t be the perfect time for the OPEC boyz to throw a wrench in the works and piggyback their agenda onto the semi-crunch that already exists. Combine this with the ever-boiling caldron of nastiness in the middle east, and it’s enough to make you trade your car for a bicycle, and to try to joi n the mysterious Commodore Studmuffin (who I’m told bears an uncanny resemblance to me) at his Last Command Post survival retreat.

Alas, I’m told the Commodore is recruiting only vacationing Japanese office ladies in bikinis for his elite squad, and the competition for enlistments remains keen.

But the competition for energy–be it gasoline, natural gas, electrons, and basically everything but cow dung–is even keener still. Although much of the globe will be perpetually mired in mud-level poverty, some of the globe does have the gumption to industrialize, and the attendant need for energy is beginning to hold sway in world markets. This Big Truth is going to dog the world economy for the foreseeable future.

I can’t forecast energy prices; if I could, I’d be so rich I wouldn’t even talk to you. Still, it looks like the energy gig is one we should all be watching closely.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”