Find your favourite indicator of fossil fuel prices. Let’s begin with the price of coal in China, where futures have surged to US$212 a metric tonne, up 20 per cent through September and 300 per cent over the past year.
Natural gas futures approached US$6 per British thermal unit. A litre of gasoline at some Toronto stations hit $1.40, a new high in nominal dollars as the price of crude oil hit US$80 a barrel. So what’s going on and what does it mean?
The first question was perhaps best answered by Jeff Currie, global head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in an interview with Bloomberg TV: “This is the first inning of a multi-year, potentially decade-long commodity supercycle.
It’s driven by the war on climate change, the war on income inequality. All of these dynamics lead to a structural rise in commodity demand against this whole idea of the revenge of the old economy.”
For the rest of this column: https://financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-four-signals-from-soaring-fossil-fuels