I spent my first day here in Austria wandering around the old Schönbrunn Palace, where the family of the old imperial family lived. The grounds were beautiful. The world’s oldest zoo is also there, and I have to say, things are looking pretty busy over here, dispite what some “recessionists” would say.

In fact, both legs of my flight were full, and the zoo and palace were crowded with tours, and today is Sunday!

Now, on my taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, I passed a power plant, a massive one. OMV is the largest utilities provider in the country, so it wasn’t a surprise to see its name plastered on the side of a building.

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An area the size of Rhode Island with a population smaller than Pawtucket has caused Russia a whole lot of trouble.

South Ossetia, with only 1,500 square miles of territory and 70,000 “citizens”, claimed independence from Georgia on November 28, 1991. Russia officially recognized the territory’s independence on August 26, 2008, twenty days after Russian troops entered the region to defend South Ossetia’s population from Georgian forces.

Less than a week later, investors in Russia were headed for the hills… And they’re still running.

The EU, currently headed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is trying to make Russia comply with the ceasefire agreement and withdraw troops. According to a BBC news report, “Some European leaders have already warned there can be ‘no business as usual’ with Russia until the peace plan is fully implemented, and the European Union has suspended talks on a new partnership agreement with Moscow.”

That’s going to be a bit difficult when it comes to Russian energy supplies, however. Russian natural gas accounts for 40% of all EU imports.

And if conflict continues into winter, it truly could be a Cold War between Russia and the EU if the Bear turns off the spigot. That’s why the EU is rushing around the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean like mad trying to scare up energy supplies and pipeline partners.

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Conspiracy theorists, meet the Nostradamus of Novels: Tom Clancy.

My colleague and fellow analyst, Christian DeHaemer, and I were reading up on the latest news from the South Ossetia conflict between Russia and Georgia. We were passing articles back and forth, trying to determine what was really at the heart of the matter, and how it would affect the markets.

(Turns out, Russian markets aren’t taking it too well… The ruble fell 1.6%.)

Then Chris turns to me and asks, “Have you ever heard of Ghost Recon?”

Back in 2001, military science novelist, Tom Clancy designed a video game called Ghost Recon. Here’s the story’s timeline…

The Russian Democratic Union, consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, is formed in 2007, with the goal of reuniting the former Soviet Union states. Action comes to a head in April 2008, when ultra-nationalists seize total power in Russia and begin invading the Baltics and Georgia. U.S. Special Forces join with rebel factions in Tbilisi, Georgia, but can’t hold back the Russian tide…

Earlier today, in real life, Russian planes flew over the presidential palace in Tbilisi.

This coincidence gave me chills. You can check out the real timeline for the current conflict in this article from Reuters.

The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, says this conflict, in which Russia is supposedly supporting a separatist faction in Abkazia (an area in South Ossetia), is because Russia wants to control energy routes through the Caucasus.

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There are those who will tell you that oil is a cyclical business and a global fungible commodity. It rises and falls with the business phase. If you look at a hundred-year chart, it is as obvious as a sidewinder on a sand dune. A sine wave through time — up and down in seven-year cycles.

But there are others who believe in the “Peak Oil” argument, the ultimate end-game, like a Suburban crushing a Subaru at the end of a long hill. Peak Oil enthusiasts will point to long lists of numbers, detailed maps of known reserves, past prognosticators of genius, and declare with tinfoil-hat fervor that “we are running out of oil.”

I’ve read these books and listened to the speeches. The idea that there is a finite amount of oil on the planet, and we are near the point where we will extract less in the next hundred years than we did in the past. Makes sense to me, as does the business cycle. I don’t know if the hundred-year history of the oil cycle is over. There is always a “this time it’s different” ideology at the peak. But then again, sometimes, it is different.

What we do know — what isn’t in dispute — is that oil is expensive, and that by all accounts the easy oil has already been found and is being extracted at a furious pace.

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