So, it's happening. Ever so slowly as people begin to realize that the rise in gas prices is the beginning of a climb in prices of everything, literally everything, that people buy. So I guess we've answered the opening question of this blog, “When does it hurt?” It hurts at about $4 a gallon, it hurts when general prices of all sorts of daily commodities jump %20 in just a few months, it hurts when the costs of basic foods jumps over 35% in less than half a year.
Of course this is also too late to intervene without some serious ramifications. It's funny how even now with an emergency of global proportions at our doorstep, the press is just beginning to say, “Hey! There might be something to this whole peak oil thing after all.” I mean, there have been very smart and very respectable people talking about the future of energy and peak oil for a very long time. The whole Hubbert's peak theory, the basis of the peak oil theories, thing was brought up in the 1950's and first proven accurate in the early 70's, we should have done serious sou searching back then. Since that time the theory has been used to accurately predict production peaks of many different countries, again each time we should have looked deeply at where we were going at started planning a way to divert disaster.
]]> So, it's happening. Ever so slowly as people begin to realize that the rise in gas prices is the beginning of a climb in prices of everything, literally everything, that people buy. So I guess we've answered the opening question of this blog, “When does it hurt?” It hurts at about $4 a gallon, it hurts when general prices of all sorts of daily commodities jump %20 in just a few months, it hurts when the costs of basic foods jumps over 35% in less than half a year.
Of course this is also too late to intervene without some serious ramifications. It's funny how even now with an emergency of global proportions at our doorstep, the press is just beginning to say, “Hey! There might be something to this whole peak oil thing after all.” I mean, there have been very smart and very respectable people talking about the future of energy and peak oil for a very long time. The whole Hubbert's peak theory, the basis of the peak oil theories, thing was brought up in the 1950's and first proven accurate in the early 70's, we should have done serious sou searching back then. Since that time the theory has been used to accurately predict production peaks of many different countries, again each time we should have looked deeply at where we were going at started planning a way to divert disaster.
But we haven't, and if you look at the history of government support of alternative energy products you'll see a repetition of small investments followed by budget cuts where these projects are the first to be cut. It would seem that the lies of the oil industry lobbyists have been well accepted by the political powers that be. And they really are lies, there really is no way to pretend like the energy experts in the industry didn't know that there were serious long term implications to running a society off of a limited resource. I mean Marion K. Hubbert, the founder of peak oil theory, was an oil industry geologist. It would seem that the oil industry was in league with the tobacco industry in figuring out how best to screw over the American people for a profit. And while it would appear that the American people will suffer heavily, they will not be the worst effected.
It is really the poorer countries of the world that will suffer the heaviest. It will be the countries where the average citizen spends 50% of their income on energy sources, be it food or fuel, where the greatest suffering will occur. Of course as the amount of income that US citizens spend on energy rises above the current 20% we'll be too panicked in our own little world to pay attention to or even think about trying to help out the marginalized billions who are starving and fighting over the ever decreasing amount of energy resources.
Boy, I could rant forever on this kind of stuff. I really don't like the direction our country is going. And really don't want to have to struggle through a depression caused by an energy crisis. But more and more it looks like that is exactly what's going to happen.
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