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Old 02-22-2011, 09:33 AM   #12
Shedwannabe
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike M. View Post
The price of everything is going up because the government and the federal reserve are debasing our currency to finance the budget shortfall that china doesn't finance. We're adding over a trillion dollars of debt each year to finance a massive and perpetual welfare and warfare state.

In reality the price of everything is actually staying the same, its our money that is losing its purchasing power.
No. What you say may be happening, but the price of everything is not actually staying the same. Fossil fuels prices (oil, gas, coal, etc.) are experiencing increasing stress because demand is increasing relative to supply, due to three major factors - 1) Overpopulation (earth is way above its carrying capacity for humans); 2) Intensive Energy Use (the US wastes energy more than most countries because of our lifestyles); and 3) Decreasing supplies of Fossil fuels (we are running out of cheap fossil fuels, or at least several types of them) True, we have enough coal for a long time, but you can't fly planes or drive cars with coal - 30-40% of our energy usage is transportation. Oil in particular, has reached its peak production capacity, and we will be seeing less oil available in the future, even though demand keeps increasing.

All this has been discussed pretty accurately in "The Transition Handbook", a study of how our society will need to find ways to come with reduced energy per capita in the future. The future is now. Though we may still find some new oil fields, for the past forty years we have been discovering less new oil than we are consuming, and most of the new oil fields are VERY HARD to develop (such as the huge Brazilian oil find...100 miles off the coast to Brazil in deep water than makes the Gulf (think BP disaster) look like easy engineering.

So, unfortunately, threads like this thread will become increasing common in the future as energy costs continue to rise relative to other costs/inflationary pressures. The best things we can do are A) Reduce overpopulation - put in effect policies that reward a stable population, and penalize population growth; B) Reduce energy usage per capita (which will be happening whether we want it or not, just preparing for it is better that finding ourselves at the cliffs edge); and C) Transitioning to renewable energy - which can be done today - electric or natural gas cars, solar electric and solar hot water homes (mine is totally off grid solar heated by solar hot water and wood), etc.
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