Blackstone Inc. co-founder Stephen Schwarzman said the world could face energy shortages so severe they trigger social unrest, Bloomberg reported.
“We’re going to end up with a real shortage of energy,” he said at a conference in Saudi Arabia. “And when you have a shortage it’s just going to cost more and it’s probably going to cost a lot more. And when that happens you’re going to get very unhappy people around the world, in the emerging markets in particular.”
Larry Fink said the same thing and there is a high probability of oil soon reaching $100 barrel. It doesn’t help that investors are rejecting investments in fossil fuels.
“Inflation, we are in a new regime,” said Fink, chairman of BlackRock Inc, the world’s biggest asset manager. “There are many structural reasons for that. Short term policy related to environmentalism, in terms of restricting supply of hydrocarbons, has created energy inflation and we are going to be living with that for some time.”
Prices of oil, natural gas, and coal have soared with crude up 65% to above $85 a barrel.
“We’re not focusing on long-term solutions, we’re not trying to change the world in a granular basis,” said Fink. “We have these visions we could go from a brown world and we could wake up tomorrow there’d be a green world. That is not going to happen.”
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