I want to take a momentary break in the discussion of the future price of oil, disintermediation and the Future of Today to express a personal message of thanks.

Yesterday this blog received kind words of recommendation from Stephen J. Dubner on the www.freakonomics.com web site.  As practically any reader with any amount of world awareness and intellectual curiousity knows, “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” is not only a best selling book, but a wonderful and unique look at the world.  Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have produced one those books that change things.  The web site is a functional work of art that if you have yet to visit, you must.  For those of you who have found Evolution Shift because of their recommendation, I promise to do what I can to welcome you and keep you here with original writing and new perspectives.  I am deeply honored by their tip of the hat.

Evolution Shift received another recommendation this week from another author I respect, James Howard Kunstler.  He placed his recommendation on www.kunstler.com under the heading ‘other web sites I like’.  He also has another site listed on this page that you can reach by clicking his name below.  It has one of the best names in blogdom; check it out.  Kunstler is a true American Iconoclast.  His most recent book, “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophies of the Twenty-First Century” is a smart, chilling look at what the …

I wrote the last post, “Remember When Gas Was Cheap?” a week ago. I based my predictions on both looking ahead and on research regarding the history of gasoline prices in the United States. In that post I predicted that gas would be $7.33 in April of 2009 and that oil would be at $137 a barrel. More immediately I predicted that when the July 4th weekend came around, the traditional start to summer driving vacation season in this automobile centric country, that the average price of gas would be $3.60.

As almost any futurist will tell you, making specific predictions that are far in the future is much more tenuous than predicting trends, as there are just too many variables that come into play at the micro level. I based the $7.33/gallon on some arithmetic projections made from gasoline price history. The same methodology was used for the July 4th $3.60 price prediction.

When the post was published last week, the first wave of response was that I was nuts to think that gas would be $3.60 in two and a half months. Others stated that they hoped I was wrong. Then all the ‘pain at the pump’ stories crowded the airwaves. By the end of the weekend it felt as though the Future had raced into the Present. Gas had gone up close to 10% nationwide since I had written “Remember”. So, a prediction that days ago startled people was now fast becoming a reality. A futurist struggling to stay …

[Readers please note that this post is written as a post to the blog April 20, 2009]

Remember when gas was cheap? Remember back in 2006 when gas was just above $3.00 a gallon and it was the top story on the evening newscasts? Well that now looks like the ‘good old days’.

Yesterday the June 2009 futures for a barrel of oil was $137 and the national average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. was $7.33. Oil has now been over the $130 mark for six months, and during that time the average gas price has been around $7.25. It is interesting that this price of gas seems to be less of a story than the $3.00 price was three years ago. Given our collective experience around this topic over the past three years, this is not surprising. Let’s take a quick look back at the last three years to the series of events that brought us to this point and all the global dynamics that were involved.

September 2005 - In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, gasoline went above $3.00 for the first time in U.S. history. At the time we were all shocked but thought that it would be temporary until the gulf coast refining capacity was restored. Because of the suffering of the gulf coast residents, we moaned about our economic pain at the pump, but sucked it up as we had nothing to complain about in comparison. At the time we did little more than …

Disintermediation was one of the buzz words of the late 1990s when Internet 1.0 was filling people with euphoria about how the world would change. Within the context of that time, Internet evangelists were saying that the Internet would largely eliminate the transactional middleman. This clearly came to pass in the travel industry as people researched and booked travel directly on-line, doing a lot of comparison shopping along the way. This, to a large degree, eliminated the travel agent, the middle man in this case, from the equation. When the airlines saw this trend and cancelled the fee they traditionally paid travel agents, the game changed forever. I’ll bet the growth of Starbucks was fueled in part by all the former travel agents becoming baristas.

The other market space that underwent disintermediation was the stock brokerage business. People could buy and sell stock on-line; no phone calls to brokers were needed. The concept, practice and “profession” of day-trading came into being. Transactions became almost immediate. Research was available on-line. Transaction fees plummeted. Who needed some broker talking to them on the phone and charging them commissions that greatly limited trading profit potential? As the coffee business swelled with well traveled baristas, the ranks of ‘independent financial advisors’ swelled with former stock brokers who now used their country club memberships to sell financial planning instead of hot stock tips.

Lately, I haven’t heard this word very much. Other buzz words and phrases seem to have superseded it. I had ranted earlier about 24/7, …