Item — HN Reader

Concentrating blindly on the gasoline price is misleading. Consider our environment: We largely wear products made directly or indirectly out of fossil fuels. We eat food grown using synthetic fertilizers made out of natural gas. That's also where the plastic in the keyboard you're typing on came from. Not to mention the rest of your computer which probably took at least a barrel of oil to produce from mining the ores to the finished product.

We live in compounds built out of materials that at least in some phase of their production include major oil or gas inputs. We drive and walk on roads literally made out of oil, in vehicles that were built out of parts which required major amounts of oil.

We live in an era of oil, our life is based on oil.

For now.

1 comments

I'm not denying peak oil, I'm arguing that oil prices (and other energy prices) have not gone up so much in recent decades that they have smashed the economy. They must impact the economy, but I sure would point to things like increased size of the domestic labor force, the skill hoisting of the global labor force and automation before I would point to energy prices. And then things like expectations of skilled labor in the U.S. have changed substantially.

I guess we'll see soon enough. I think oil price is the real reason behind the economic trouble.

I think we're in for several more 2008-style stair step economic crashes over a longer period of time, with little growth between them. At least until we can truly replace oil as a transportable high density energy source. (Or until political and societal systems break down.)

Hopefully we get some major new energy source, like cheap fusion or space based generation, like orbital mass production of photovoltaics panels and beaming it back to earth in microwaves. Given sufficient energy, we could just synthesize the liquid fuels we need.

There's unfortunately a low chance we get this magic energy source in time, but let's hope for the best.