A NEW “NORMAL”

Hikes in gas prices are affecting everyone and everything. Today I read how airlines are raising their fare prices for the sixth time this year! They report no decreases in passenger travel …yet (I guess people who need to fly will continue to fly…until they don’t!) but state fare increases aren't keeping pace with fuel cost increases," FareCompare.com CEO Rick Seaney says leisure travelers may now have to pay $260 for a ticket that cost $200 back on Jan. 1.

I mentioned in an earlier post an article I’d read re the rising cost of food. Rising oil prices cause rising food prices in three ways. First, increased equipment fuel costs drive higher prices. Second, transportation costs increase retail prices. Third, higher oil prices are causing farmers to switch from producing food crops to producing biofuel crops. The law of supply and demand predicts that if fewer farmers are producing food the price of food will rise.

We’ve been warned for decades now of the need for alternative energy sources, not just because peak oil had already been reached in most of the biggest oil fields in the world (since the mid 2000’s all the worlds major oil producing countries were producing at maximum capacity and many have now peaked) and we are now on the downside of production; not only because of the adverse affects to our environment (global “warming“); but to also avoid what we are beginning to see, fast rising and unaffordable prices (in these times of economic distress) due to unrest in other parts of the world where most of our supplies of oil come from. In the US we produce only 25% of the oil we use. I suspect until every last drop of oil, and the profits from them, is extracted by the greedy oil corporations and all who benefit from the market, we will see them buy our politicians support and be assured an “alternative” energy source is not viable in any significant way.

The American Petroleum Institute estimated in 1999 the world's oil supply would be depleted between 2062 and 2094. That’s only 50 years away, my sons would be alive and in their early 80’s…my grandchildren only 56 and 58, without an alternative energy supply what will their quality of life be? What will planet Earth look like in just a short 50 years time?

A study published in the journal Energy Policy by researchers from Oxford University, however, predicted demand would surpass supply by as early as 2015. The world's oil supply is fixed because petroleum is naturally formed far too slowly to be replaced at the rate at which it is being extracted. So don’t be looking for those prices at the pump, or in home fuel costs, or at the grocery checkout to go back down to “normal” anytime soon. We have arrived at a “new normal".

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. ~Abraham Lincoln